
Class 
Book. 



A 



CQEffllGHT DEPOSIT. 



MODERN ENGLISH 
STATESMEN 



MODERN ENGLISH 
STATESMEN * * 



K 



By 
G. R. STIRLING TAYLOR 




NEW YORK 
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY 

1921 



Copyright, 1921, by 
Robert M. McBride & Ca 



-j>M* 



A 



Printed in the 

United States of America 



Published, 1921 



DEC 23 7 

©CLA653B15 



. ■ r 






CONTENTS 



FAOS 

CHAPTER I 
STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP .... I 



CHAPTER II 
OLIVER CROMWELL 27 

CHAPTER III 
THE WALPOLES 76 

CHAPTER IV 
THE PITT FAMILY: AND ITS MYTHS . . . . 120 

CHAPTER V 
EDMUND BURKE 1 65 

CHAPTER VI 
BENJAMIN DISRAELI, EARL OF BEACONSFIELD . . 2IO 

INDEX 263 



MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

CHAPTER I 

STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP 

IT is one of the unsolved problems of history whether 
great statesmen rule their country or whether they 
merely register the desires and opinions of their age, 
their race and their nation. It is the question whether 
great men govern or obey. It is no answer to produce 
a royal proclamation or a chancellor's ruling, or even 
the statute book of an elected parliament. The funda- 
mental mystery still remains, whether any man or parlia- 
ment, however despotic or however wise, has ever made 
a people do anything that was outside the tradition of the 
race. It is the problem whether racial or national tra- 
dition is not altogether more powerful than the orders 
of the most masterful government that ever existed. Did 
Augustus order the Roman people to obey him as their 
emperor, or did the united impulse of the republican 
citizens order Augustus to organize them as an Empire? 
Would it not be near the truth to say that the people of 
Rome had already made themselves into a despotism 
long before they allowed Augustus to act so openly? 
Did the late German Emperor rule the Germans, or did 
he carry out the imperious will of that race? Were they 
servile to him, or was he servile to them? Did Chatham 

I 



2 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

force the English people to build an Empire, or did he 
merely act as their organizing agent? Do statesmen ex- 
press their own will, or the will of those who seem to 
be their subjects? The problem is put into the balance 
almost every time that we weigh a historical fact. 

The question may never be answered in any absolute 
way : and this for the very good reason that there may 
be no conclusive answer. It is only the timekeeper and 
the drill-sergeant who have rigid rules of life. Nature, 
being neither a pedant nor a bureaucrat, has a happy way 
of doing the best with each case as it comes along. Some- 
times the autocrat has his will for a time; and then the 
rising of a people will toss him away as easily as a wave 
tosses a cork. There is a continual giving and taking be- 
tween a people and those who govern them. It is impos- 
sible to make a case for the victory of one side which 
quite excludes the other. Nevertheless the evidence 
would seem to point to the ultimate supremacy of national 
tradition — which is national will — over the will of the 
statesman. A governor can survive for a time; it may 
be that for a whole lifetime he may impose his rule 
against the wishes of his subjects. There are cases where 
a series of despots have ruled against the will of a race; 
but sooner or later, the racial command pushes its way 
through the weight of authority above. Nevertheless, 
the argument again (with the uncertain indecision of 
Nature once more) moves across to the other side, when 
we have to admit that although a nation usually has the 
power to overthrow an autocratic statesman — be he king 
or banker — yet, since there cannot be cause without effect, 
the nation that emerges is not quite the same that it 
would have been had it never been submerged under the 



STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP 3 

despotism. To that extent the great autocrats win. But, 
again, in the final summing up it is probable that the 
effect of the personal ruler is as the blowing of a con- 
trary wind against an ocean tide : it blows the breakers 
into whiter foam; it cannot stop the irresistible flow. A 
book on statesmen is, after all, merely a book on foam 
and not on tides. But if they are foam, they are the 
result of tides; and, to that extent, they are symbolic. 

It is not generally recognized that the action of a states- 
man may be very spectacular on the page of history, and 
yet he may have done nothing but touch the surface of 
the national life. The vast bulk of human life, in a broad 
sense, has been almost untouched by the laws and ordi- 
nances declared by ruling men and representative assem- 
blies. One talks loosely of despotism, but it may be very 
blatant and yet not go very deep. An Englishman who 
knew Russia under the autocratic Czar said that there 
was more individual liberty in that country than in Eng- 
land. There was probably a touch of paradox in that 
statement; but there was certainly more than a touch of 
truth also. For the greater part of its career the human 
race progressed without much of what we should call 
"government" to-day. Government is a comparatively 
modern idea; and to that extent statesmanship is only a 
modern trade. It is a trade that has been growing since 
the Renaissance with alarming speed; and perhaps al- 
ready it is untrue to say that it does not affect the funda- 
mentals of human existence; but it is only recently that 
it has become untrue. Even in the eighteenth century the 
Chathams and the Burkes and their kind could make 
mighty displays in the Houses of Parliament and yet have 
comparatively little effect on the lives of the citizens in 



4 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

general. They had scarcely thought of such coercive 
measures as Conscription Acts, Insurance Acts, and the 
dozens of ways in which the State now invades the Eng- 
lishman's home that was once his castle. It is only dur- 
ing the last half-century that the modern politicians have 
realized that by cleverly drafted laws and a faithful army 
and police force they may reduce the ordinary citizen to 
a more helpless creature than a black slave. 

If one gets away from the popular notion of the ortho- 
dox history-books that statesmen have been the chief 
driving force in our national life; if one can regard the 
whole scene of history with an unprejudiced eye; then 
kings and governors will still take a real and -permanent 
place in the picture — but they will stand as mere figures 
in a landscape, as it were, with mountains and rivers of 
national traditions far bigger than themselves. English 
history will be seen to be the story of a race, and not a 
national portrait gallery. It would not be too extreme 
a statement to say that statesmen are only the trivial side 
of history. It would be almost possible to write an in- 
telligible account of the development of England without 
mentioning personal names except at very occasional mo- 
ments. For example, before the Conquest it might be 
necessary to mention Alfred the Great, and perhaps Cnut, 
with Bede and Dunstan; but the main early story, at least, 
might be told in that impersonal way which will seem 
natural when we remember that we are dealing with a 
nation which scarcely as yet made laws in parliaments 
and had not yet invented politics and politicians. The 
people of those days obeyed the rules of their own tra- 
ditions, as they were maintained in their own local courts : 
they had scarcely yet heard of kings' courts and their 



STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP 5 

justices. The Norman Conquest itself could almost be 
told without mentioning the name of William; for he 
was only one of a group of freebooter feudal lords who 
were searching for lands and plunder. But though we 
could easily tell the whole truth about the Conquest with- 
out mentioning the leader, yet, strangely enough, it would 
be necessary to introduce this William as a distinctive 
individual when we had to tell how he conquered, not our 
Anglo-Saxon selves, but his own unruly barons. His 
conquest of England was mainly a part in the collective 
role of a military group more highly skilled in arms than 
the opposing native tribe. It is unnecessary to remem- 
ber the names of the British generals who have crushed 
the hundred and one native races in our pursuit of the 
British Empire; and William was merely a general of a 
superior tribe, so far as the actual invasion went. But 
his crushing of the baronial independence was far more 
an act depending on his personal will and individual 
energy: it was the policy of a specific man. 

So one might continue pointing out isolated individual 
leaks which must stand out as islands in the sea of na- 
tional history. As a romance, as a way of attracting the 
attention of the young learner, there are thousands of 
names worth remembering in the history of England. 
As a scientific statement of sociological development, it 
might all be told with very few personalities. Such as 
Henry II and Edward I might justly assert their right to 
a distinctive place : and Becket and Simon de Montford 
would have to be there : as Lanfranc and Anselm might 
have to be mentioned beside the early Norman kings. 
But why should we trouble to think of the names of the 
dozens of self-seeking, quarrelsome lords who called 



6 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

themselves kings and statesmen during the later Plan- 
tagenets and the Wars of the Roses? Warwick the 
Kingmaker was, like Henry IV, little more than a man 
seeking for place and lands; and it is not scientific to call 
the plans of an adventurer by the dignified name of states- 
manship. On the other hand, Edward IV and Richard 
III, although still adventurers, begin a new line of more 
individualist kings; and all the Tudors except Edward 
VI need naming and explaining. By the days of the 
Tudors it was becoming the more usual habit to rule 
England by instructions from Westminster and White- 
hall; and the personality of the men who gave these 
orders was therefore of more importance than when a 
monarch was mainly a military leader. 

From this time personal names are thicker on the 
pages of our history-books, for government had now 
become a profession, and was daily becoming a more and 
more successful one — from the point of view of the gov- 
ernors. They were getting more and more successful 
in making the people obey the laws that the politicians 
made. The English were gradually getting more laws, 
and, on the whole, less freedom. But even now there is 
no reason why the personalities of these later days should 
cumber our history to the extent they do. Indeed, they 
rather hamper the tale. The vitally important story of 
the Reformation — when a gang of adventurers seized 
the Church lands in the same way that William and his 
Norman knights had seized their plunder — this funda- 
mental change in English policy, from mediaeval to 
modern, does not peculiarly attach itself to any individ- 
ual. To discuss Henry's fancy for Anne Boleyn is only 
to put the student on the wrong tack. Or to name the 



STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP 7 

theologians is to assume that a religious principle was 
at stake, when it scarcely was. Whereas we should be 
concentrating the whole attention on the crowd of insig- 
nificant Court officials who were feathering the nests of 
themselves and their friends out of the Church estates. 
They were an impersonal class — powerful only when 
taken in bulk. Thomas Cromwell was only one of these 
adventurers, and, except as a convenient symbol, there 
is no real need to mention even him. William Cecil, 
Lord Burghley, a few years later, stands in a unique posi- 
tion, as we shall see : he was a man who really did govern. 
But if the list of personal names grows fuller as his- 
tory continues* yet it must be carefully noted that, al- 
though a statesman may make many new laws and may 
get them obeyed by the people, still it is possible that 
these laws may remain only on the surface of the national 
life. Think of all the violent legal changes during the 
great civil war of the Stuart period — changes expressed 
by Act of Parliament and enforced by governors' com- 
mands. Then realize how insignificant all these were in 
affecting the national life, compared with the entirely 
unofficial invention of a few factory machines during the 
second half of the eighteenth century. Of course, had 
it had not been for Oliver Cromwell and his dismal men, 
the trading and manufacturing classes would not have 
been so well prepared for the Industrial Revolution; if 
they had not first successfully gone through the political 
revolution of the Stuart days, they would not have been 
ready to effect the far greater changes of the eighteenth 
century. Can any one claim that the Great Charter of 
John has had as much effect on England as the develop- 
ment of ou coal and iron? The quarrel between the 



8 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

Lancastrians and Yorkists was merely a back-street brawl 
compared with the struggle between merchants for the 
conquest of our economic life. The whole Statute Book 
has not affected our social system as much as the invention 
of steam power and the telegraph. Political affairs are 
only the secondary effect of industrial and private busi- 
ness. The point to grasp at the moment is the fact that 
it is not mainly by the acts and administrations of states- 
men that a nation is most drastically affected. A race is 
usually only radically impressed by causes of which the 
governors are not aware until everything is settled. The 
statesman is usually in the position of a policeman who 
arrives when the fight is over. Most of the important 
things that happen in a State are begun and finished by 
people who pay as little attention to rulers as rulers pay 
to them. We must, if we are to get the main propor- 
tions right, get it firmly in the mind that the sphere of 
statesmanship may be on the top, and therefore in a very 
prominent position; yet it does not by any means follow 
that its influence at all corresponds to its display — for 
much the same reason that a regimental band is not the 
most important part of the regiment. 

It scarcely seems fair to the rest of this book to explain 
at such length that its subject is unimportant. Yet the 
argument has only attempted to put statesmen in their 
proper place — not to dismiss them. Quite apart from 
their personal merits, they are such useful symbols of 
national movements. To borrow from Voltaire, if they 
had not existed it would have been necessary to invent 
them. The ones chosen for this volume have been 
selected because they stand for great tendencies far 
greater than themselves. Cromwell is chosen because he 



STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP 9 

seems the first representative of modern statesmanship. 
William Cecil (in many ways the most serious and most 
accomplished statesman that England ever possessed) 
might be put first for many reasons; but, as will be dis- 
cussed later, it is better to regard him as the last of the 
old school, instead of the first of the new. Cromwell 
marks the final blowing out of the Middle Ages, which 
gave their last flicker with Charles Stuart. When the 
head of that strange figure fell in Whitehall it marked 
very dramatically the end of the old era. History has no 
hard boundary lines; but man's mind, being limited and 
easily confused, must fix dates which will keep him from 
chaotic wandering. The day of Charles I's execution is 
one of those most useful dates. The mediaeval system 
had been a long time dying; but until Charles was be- 
headed there was something of it left. And his chief 
executioner is the most fitting figure to express the new 
system that was to take its place. The mediaeval Mon- 
archy, based to a large extent on the nation, gave way 
to the modern Oligarchy, based on a privileged class. 
There was a sense in which Charles had stood for the 
whole people; and, especially during the eleven years of 
his absolute rule without a parliament, he had somewhat 
definitely been the protector of the poor against the rich. 
If Cromwell and the Commonwealth can be generalized 
at all, it can only be said that this party stood for the 
supremacy of the rich. The Commonwealth was the tri- 
umphant government of the merchants and the smaller 
county gentry, who had risen on the raided wealth of 
the mediaeval Church. The complete triumph of the 
merchant was not to come until the days when Robert 
Peel, the son of a merchant prince, rose to be the Chief 



io MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

Minister of England. But that was not to be until the 
Reform Act of 1832 had put the middle trading class in 
supreme possession of the franchise. From Cromwell to 
Peel the merchant and manufacturer and small landlord 
(that is, the middle class) had been continually growing 
in power; but it was not yet, as a general rule, considered 
seemly for any one except a member of the aristocracy 
to hold office. There was still a vague belief that blue 
blood had some inherent right to rule. There was still 
a distrust of the political adventurer, carried to such a 
degree that we find the nation trusting the political fool — 
but, after all, the fool does less harm by his folly than 
the knave by his wits. So although Cromwell by the 
swords of his Ironside troopers began the process which 
put the middle classes into power as the basis of modern 
England, yet for generations to come an aristocratic 
oligarchy governed on behalf of the new commercialists ; 
and took a very liberal share of the spoils of wealth, and 
almost all the offices of State, in return for their services. 
The three succeeding figures of this book are from the 
period of the aristocratic oligarchy, which was to give 
way to the plutocratic oligarchy in the lifetime of Sir 
Robert Peel. Robert Walpole is chosen partly because 
he is the finest example of themselves that the Oligarchs 
have to offer. In Walpole they rose to their first worthy 
success; and it was a success which they never repeated 
with as much intellect or as much moral sanity. Walpole 
was the first and best balanced statesman that the oli- 
garchy produced. Of course, many facts must be ad- 
mitted against him. He did not rise very far above the 
somewhat selfish ideals of his period and his class. He 
was in power as the First Minister of a nation whose 



STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP n 

ruling class was primarily interested in the making of 
trading profits and the raising of rents. Cromwell had 
finally decided that the merchant adventurers of the 
Tudor foundation were to be given a free head in Eng- 
lish social development; the middle class was established 
in power, and remained there even though Charles II 
came back. By Walpole's day these merchants had 
enormously increased in influence: the City of London 
had even more to do with the Revolution of 1688 than 
with the Great Rebellion against Charles I : and William 
of Orange gave more attention to the invitation he got 
from the City magistrates than he gave to the welcome 
of the peers. Walpole was, above all else, the expres- 
sion of a merchants' England. But there was a broad 
dignity about his government which remembered that 
there was a national price which it was unwise to pay for 
the benefits of mercantile success. He accepted the fact 
that fate had made England a great trading community; 
but he showed no intention of pressing that development 
beyond its due growth. He was prepared to help Eng- 
lish merchants to get their fair share of the wealth of the 
world: he was prepared to help them to trade as honest 
men. He was not ready to turn the strength of the 
British people into an organized scheme for playing the 
part of pirates to the universe. He protested against 
fighting Spain just because a set of City merchants saw 
their way to plundering Spanish commerce; he only gave 
way to the popular wishes with the cynicism of a gentle- 
man who finds he has become hopelessly involved in a 
disreputable trading company. The day may even yet 
come when his famous prophecy, "They will be wringing 
their hands soon," will come true: when the British Em- 



12 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

pire may repentantly admit that it has been too un- 
bounded in its greed, and that the wealth of the world 
is not worth its envy and contempt. Robert Walpole 
was the last great English statesman who had that rest- 
ful sense of social development which has been lost in the 
tumult of modern government. He carried into the 
modern period that conception of society which was al- 
most the main characteristic of the mediaeval system: 
namely, that the growth of a people, like the growth of a 
child, is bounded by natural laws, and cannot be forced 
by Acts of Parliament or regulations of departments of 
State. Walpole would have allowed the trade of Eng- 
land to grow in this natural manner: he did not believe 
in sudden outbursts of energy, just as an intelligent man 
does not believe that an infant can be forced to full 
stature in a year. He would have had England grow, 
most certainly — but with dignity and peace. The chaos 
of war he regarded with the contempt of a wise man, and 
the practice of mercantile piracy with the aversion of a 
gentleman. He was one of the few modern statesmen 
who have shown more respect to the traditions of their 
race than to the intrigues of those unrestful beings who 
imagine that their passing thoughts and ambitions are the 
wisdom of eternity. Walpole had no desire for great 
changes : he only wanted to take the next step, and to 
take it with skill and dignity. Indeed, he was a curious 
survival of an older school of thought, one who would 
have been better suited to the age of the late Plantagenets. 
The Pitts have been chosen as the expression of every- 
thing that Walpole was not. As a family, they are a 
typical example of the modern English ruling class. 
They rose into wealth as the heirs of that somewhat un- 



STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP 13 

scrupulous Indian trader, Diamond Pitt; and they won 
their right to office by a clever linking (by marriage) 
with the older aristocracy of England. They therefore 
represented both the mercantile basis of the government 
of that period, and also the bluer blood of the families 
that acted as the agents of this middle-class plutocracy. 
The mental, moral and physical character of the elder 
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, cuts across every line of 
his rival Walpole. Pitt was excitable and a bundle of 
hysterical emotions; he was unscrupulous and ungenerous 
in his grasping at power; ? 2 was rotten-timbered in phys- 
ical structure, and his brain was more than once beyond 
normal control. Walpole had been content to develop 
his country with sober care. Pitt dreamed of the build- 
ing of the British Empire with the terrific force of a 
nightmare. To make the Empire larger and wealthier 
became a monomania in his mind. The world in his 
imagination became a colossal prize-ring, in which he 
was to drive every opponent over the ropes — with as 
much blood spilt as possible. His method was physical 
force; which is not surprising, for he did not possess the 
brains necessary for diplomacy or systematic thought. 
He believed in war, which is naturally the first resource 
of the dull-witted, as it is the last hope of the wise. The 
Pitts stood for conquest by war, while Walpole had in- 
sisted that what could not be won by peaceful methods 
was rarely worth the getting. Walpole was exceedingly 
balanced in his intellect; Chatham was entirely at the 
mercy of his unstable emotions. Walpole wanted to 
leave the nation to follow the course of its natural social 
growth in an orderly and unforced way. Chatham had 
the temperament of a gambler on the Stock Exchange or 



14 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

an American hustler; he regarded the British Empire 
as a thing to be "developed"; as a speculator regards 
the fields and mines of a new colony. With all his 
pompous manners and imperial pose, Chatham was at 
heart a company promoter, who thought he saw a 
good thing in the English race as an investment. He 
was by no means sordid or selfish in his objects; he 
was that which was a good deal worse in a statesman — 
full of heroic and poetical ideals, which made the rather 
sentimental Englishmen think that they were led by a 
genius. Whereas they were being misled (as we shall 
find when we examine the evidence) by something not 
far from a mental degenerate, in the medical sense. The 
younger Pitt was the true son of his father Chatham, 
and completes the family picture. He was not so pushing 
a salesman as his self-made father; and he had to depend 
more on his better education and on his inherited posi- 
tion. If he had not been the son of the Earl of Chatham 
it is safe to say that history would have known little or 
nothing of his existence. The economists have proved 
that he was an incompetent financier; and the military 
experts have proved that he was more than an incompe- 
tent bungler at the game of war. It was only as his 
father's son that he crept into the history-books, and has 
continued to defy criticism because the historians have 
usually preferred to copy each other's opinions instead 
of valuing the facts for themselves. The Pitt Myth is 
one of those interesting superstitions that have gripped 
the human mind. It is one of the clearest examples of 
the social law that men are not so much controlled by their 
intellect as by their emotions. It also illustrates the 
troublesome fact that an accidental error of thought can 



STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP 15 

become by inheritance and age more permanent than the 
truth. The Pitts are the type of the modern statesmen 
who imagine that a race can be changed by Act of Parlia- 
ment, manipulated by smart administrators, and driven 
to its destiny by brilliant soldiering. They represent the 
change from progress by orderly national tradition to 
the acrobatic feats of individual energy. They are a 
clear example of the process by which government has 
passed from being the expression of the desire of the 
racial majority (which is near democracy) to the impos- 
ing of the will of the governors (which is certainly autoc- 
racy, and usually tyranny) . 

Edmund Burke was not really a statesman in the sense 
of being a politician or administrator. He did compara- 
tively little in Parliament or in office — he never rose to 
Cabinet rank. He was a political pamphleteer and a 
literary orator, who supplied a certain intellectual pad- 
ding to the real politicians, who were not too well supplied 
with brains; and, when they possessed them, were too full 
of intrigues for office to spend time over mere matters of 
principle or problems of scientific government. Let it 
not be supposed that Burke represented intellect. He 
was a bundle of emotions, like the Earl of Chatham; 
but they were emotions tinged with historical facts and 
logical argument; whereas when Chatham ceased to be 
hysterical he only too frequently became stupid. But 
Burke had the makings of a better man; he is an inter- 
esting example of a young man who was ruined by going 
into politics, when he might have spent a harmless life 
as a country parson or a minor poet. He was a senti- 
mentalist of the first rank; and his chief work in politics 
was to deck out a vast amount of shallow folly and 



1 6 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

disreputable intrigue in the admirable colours of a florid 
literary style and a question-begging logic. Burke was 
one of the men who become the unconscious tools of pro- 
fessional politicians. The Whig "principles" that had so 
cleverly tricked England in 1688 were getting rather 
soiled by the days of George III. It was Burke who 
re-dressed them and gave them another career in the 
great work of making the English nation believe that its 
modern politicians are serious statesmen. Burke is an 
example of the vast harm that can be done by lending 
moral and intellectual support to a class that is generally 
incapable of using such help. He was not a great man 
either in intellect or in morals; but he was great enough 
to give his friends too much credit for possessing both. 
He is perhaps chiefly interesting as an example of the 
half-intelligent, half-honest persons who are always in- 
truding with conviction and enthusiasm into political life. 
The main result of their endeavours is that the politicians 
are able to operate behind a smoke screen of honester 
men. Not that Burke failed to affect history: it is fair 
to suggest that his action against the French Revolution 
modified the history of Europe to this present day. Had 
it not been for Burke's assistance, it is doubtful whether 
the politicians would ever have persuaded the English 
people to struggle until they had crushed the French 
Revolution. It was Burke's shrill shrieking (like a 
philosopher in a nightmare) that persuaded not only 
England, but Europe also, that the Revolution was alto- 
gether evil and must be altogether broken. In other 
words, had it not been for his utter failure to judge the 
Revolution with the calmness of a philosopher and the 
impartiality of a historian, Europe would have seen that 



STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP 17 

there was much that was inevitable and necessary in the 
rising of the French people against their over-centralized 
bureaucracy. Europe would have seen that the crimes of 
the Revolution were the deeds of a small gang of scoun- 
drels and fanatics who come to the top in every revolu- 
tion; and that the men who made the Terror no more 
represented France than the last sensational murderer 
represents his race. Had it not been for Burke's melo- 
dramatic rhetoric it would have been obvious that the 
kings of Europe were not concerned with the salvation 
of the French (as they pretended), but were only anxious 
to plunder a nation when it was weakened by a struggle 
with internal anarchy. It was Burke's unbalanced hys- 
teria that probably turned the scale, that encouraged 
the royal and political adventurers of Europe to attack 
France, and therefore gave the French militarists and 
rogues the chance they were seeking — an excuse for 
appealing to the French nation to defend its frontiers by 
invading the lands of its neighbours first. Hence the 
calamity of the Revolutionary Wars; hence the greater 
calamity of Napoleon. If any one man was guilty of 
turning the Revolution from a noble beginning to an 
ignoble conclusion, it was Edmund Burke, the sentimen- 
talist. He is an example of the fact that the well- 
meaning man can do more harm than the rogue when he 
meddles with public affairs. 

As for Benjamin Disraeli, he, like Burke, did little in 
politics proper. He was certainly Prime Minister of 
England twice; he was one of the most audaciously 
brilliant figures that the Houses of Parliament have seen. 
But his political deeds were only the idle moments of 
his life. Disraeli was a thinker; and what he thought 



18 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

he put into books, and rarely translated into the deed 
of an Act of Parliament. He was perhaps the most 
brilliant thinker of his age ; and he was great because he 
refused to be original and went back to the thoughts of 
older days. Disraeli was the only modern statesman 
who has had the courage to tell his nation that it was 
rotten from the foundation. His Popanilla is the most 
amazingly clever burlesque of modern society that has 
been written — which perhaps is the reason why there 
has been almost a universal agreement not to read it. It 
is one of the really dangerous books that threaten to 
undermine the foundations of modern life. It is the 
sort of book that would be suppressed under the Defence 
of the Realm Act — if the censors had the brains to 
grasp its meaning. There would, however, be the em- 
barrassment that it was written by Queen Victoria's 
favourite Tory Prime Minister. Disraeli is chosen as a 
type of modern English statesmen not because he is 
really a type, but mainly because he is almost a unique 
specimen. He was so much wiser than his colleagues, 
and so much more advanced than the people of his time, 
that he could do scarcely anything in politics, except 
amaze Europe by his brilliancy and convulse it by his wit. 
Indeed, he had all the qualities by which the unscrupulous 
adventurer could have fooled his generation — had he 
desired. But Disraeli was one of the honest men. His 
greatest credit in history is that he faced the people with 
the truth about themselves — and then turned to politics 
with the cynical air of a man who preferred to take his 
amusement in the House of Commons rather than the 
card-room or the racecourse; because he had brains, and 
Parliament gave him more scope to use them. The career 



STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP 19 

of Disraeli shows us why a wise and honest man must 
fail in modern politics — mainly for the reason that a fish 
cannot live on dry land. One must be within the facts of 
one's environment. 

Such are the five examples here chosen to represent 
English modern statesmanship, with the main comparison 
between themselves. But it is really more important to 
see where they stand as against the main background of 
English history and English politicians. It is necessary, 
for one thing, to find some general standard by which to 
compare the modern statesmen with the men of the 
earlier days. It will be useful to determine why 
Burghley, the last of the older school, was so distinctly 
apart from Oliver Cromwell, whom we have called the 
first of the new men. Perhaps one main point of differ- 
ence can be seen if the men of the older school are called 
statesmen, and those of the modern school are termed 
politicians; suggesting thereby the difference between a 
skilled doctor and a quack : or the difference between 
one who rules and one who talks. But, of course, the 
statement would need qualifications to save such men as 
Cromwell, Walpole and Disraeli from the imputation. 
For the vast bulk of the modern men the term "politician" 
is obviously fitting. Let examples be taken at the two 
extremities; compare Burghley with a politician of to- 
day, and the justice of the comparison will be admitted. 
Burghley was an exceedingly skilled administrator of the 
most technical kind; the State Papers of his period are 
covered with his notes. He was not only what we should 
now call Prime Minister, he was also permanent secre- 
tary of all the Government departments as well. In the 
most precise meaning, to the smallest detail, he ruled 



20 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

England for almost the whole of Elizabeth's reign — 
until his age forced him to hand over the work to his son. 
Admitting that he never had the intellect or the courage 
to protest against the stupidity of the Reformation eco- 
nomic settlement as a whole, nevertheless such an effective 
accomplishment of technical skill in devising a national 
policy, and ability to carry it into practice, has not been 
repeated in our history. His policy has vitally affected 
the history of his country to this day : and it is conceivable 
that we may even go back to it in many of its details. 

Can one imagine anything more remote from the work 
of the modern politicians? They spend their time on the 
public platform and in the Houses of Parliament. Their 
main claim to fame is their power of speech. As regards 
administration, they flit from department to department, 
as fits their political necessities, and scarcely touch details 
at all. They are primarily orators and debaters. They 
usually receive their policy from the permanent adminis- 
trators of their departments; and they adopt so much of 
it as suits their intrigues, so much of it as will bring them 
again into power at the next election. They are not so 
much thinkers or administrators as gramophones. They 
reproduce their records. Burghley was as the poles 
apart from such men. Do we ever hear that he made 
a public speech? We do know that he left so many 
State Papers that it would be beyond belief that he 
had even seen them, if it were not that so many of 
them bear his own handwriting. There are over twelve 
hundred documents for his seventy-fifth year alone, when 
he was almost past work. Mr. Gladstone, one of the 
modern statesmen, was famous because he wrote so many 
postcards, and he also became still more famous for his 



STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP 21 

rhetoric: indeed, he probably owed his position in 
English politics to his fine voice. In Burghley's day there 
were higher tests than these. 

We must remember, to make the comparison quite 
complete, that Burghley was also an accomplished 
scholar. He could write in Latin, French and Italian as 
well as he could in English. How many of our modern 
statesmen had such an advantage during the recent 
Paris Peace Congress? But there was a still more funda- 
mentally useful quality which he possessed: he was incor- 
ruptibly honest. That is, he always considered the 
interests of the English nation before his own. No 
enemy of England even tried to bribe William Cecil. 
One historian has told us that he risked everything to 
protect the State, and many times he risked much to pro- 
tect his friends from unjust attack. There are still people 
who consider themselves educated who are roused to the 
point of irritation when it is claimed that the Ministers 
of Queen Elizabeth were probably as efficient and as 
honest as any who have ever served this State. The 
irritation is a very interesting exhibition of the narrow 
and local prejudice of a normal modern mind. Not hav- 
ing the time to consider the facts, or lacking the ability 
to weigh them when known, the modern man assumes 
that everything is better to-day than three hundred years 
ago; he assumes that things must have necessarily "de- 
veloped" or "evolved" in the meantime. It is to no 
avail that such an authority as Dr. Cunningham tells us 
that Burghley "set a very remarkable example of im- 
peccability. He was scrupulously careful to avoid 
profiting in any way by his political influence, and refused 
the gifts from successful suitors which were at that time 



22 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

the accepted method of making payments for work done." 
One could quote, at great length, the same high authority 
on the subject of Burghley's efficiency; for example: 
"The notes on petitions submitted to him show how 
carefully he read them, while he sometimes conducted a 
Royal Commission on his own account, and collected 
very many papers containing expert opinion from various 
quarters. He was constantly at work in revising the 
estimates and cutting down expenses ... all overhauled 
by him in the hope of checking abuses and securing a 
reasonable amount of honesty." As to his personal 
honesty, the Dictionary of National Biography sums up : 
"There is good reason for believing that if his father 
had not left him an ample patrimony he would have died 
as poor a man as many another of Elizabeth's ablest and 
most faithful servants." Can the modern mind sincerely 
believe that such a character sketch would be true of a 
typical modern politician? It is a matter of opinion, of 
course; but in this case it certainly would appear that 
the opinion here expressed is on the same side as the 
facts. The attitude of the normal "modern" man de- 
fending his centuries is rather like the healthy, if some- 
what unpolished, defence by the village patriots of their 
local cricket team, after it has suffered its sixth consecu- 
tive defeat. 

It is better to face the facts ; and a calm perusal of the 
history of English statesmanship forces to the disagree- 
able conclusion that there has been a persistent lowering 
of both the moral and technical standard as time has 
passed. It is necessary to make it clear that in this gen- 
eralization only the men at the top of the political ladder 
are considered. One is comparing the First Ministers 



STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP 23 

of the Middle Ages with the First Ministers of to-day; 
or, one might say, the King's Council of the past with 
the present Cabinet. It is probable that there is as 
much, if not more, efficiency and honesty in the average 
public servant to-day than there ever was. The criticism 
is of that purely political class which is the peculiar 
product of the modern period. To take an extreme case : 
is there anyone in the modern period (since Burghley) 
who can equal Alfred the Great in the breadth of his 
statesmanship? Professor Oman has written: "Looking 
up and down the ages there is no one but St. Louis of 
France who can be compared to Alfred. . . . Truly this 
Alfred was no mere national hero, no ordinary 'patron 
of arts and letters,' but a man of great ideas, a figure of 
transcendent energy." "Alfred made history . . . what 
he accomplished was never undone." The man who had 
to save his country from being plundered by a race of 
pirates, who were on the verge of capturing all England 
for their permanent home, was also the man who laid 
the foundation of the English State and its social ma- 
chinery. To quote Professor Oman again: "This great 
fighter and administrator was not merely the victorious 
general of a dozen campaigns, the founder of a navy, 
the rebuilder of the internal organization of Church and 
State, but also a scholar and author; one who loved alike 
the old national poetry of his own race and the literature 
of Rome." Those were not days when statesmen made 
speeches. There is naturally a healthy sense of the im- 
portance of deeds not words when an enemy is on the 
point of burning one out of home and fields; so perhaps 
it was the Danes who taught Alfred to be practical. 
Anyhow, "The moment he had the power and the leisure, 



24 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

Alfred set to work to collect about him the few scholars 
who were yet to be found in England . . . and would 
always contrive to have one of them at his side, for at 
every spare moment of night or day he wished to have 
books read to him, Latin or English." Let the reader 
allow his mind to turn suddenly to the present politicians, 
when they also have just been relieved from the urgent 
peril of a foreign conquest. Are they surrounded by the 
wise men of the land? But the record of Alfred must 
be read in detail if one is to understand the essential 
fact that he was a statesman who was rich in practical 
deeds, and not a politician skilled in rhetorical generali- 
zations. It is one of the main distinctions between the 
statesman of the old school and the new. 

It would be easy to take other great figures from the 
earlier governors of England and compare them with the 
men of like position in the modern period. For example, 
set down such couples as St. Anselm and Mr. Gladstone; 
Simon de Montford and Mr. Canning; Wolsey and 
Chatham; Burghley and the Younger Pitt; Edward I and 
Sir Robert Peel; Edward IV and George IV; Edmund 
Rich with all the Archbishops of Canterbury since Regi- 
nald Pole; Sir Thomas More with all the Chancellors of 
England after him. Let there be every admission that 
there are many exceptional cases on both sides of the line. 
There were innumerable political adventurers and dis- 
honest officials during the mediaeval period; and there 
have been dozens of hard-working, wholly good-inten- 
tioned men who have governed England since. We have 
but to mention such men as Peter of Savoy and Warwick 
the Kingmaker to remember that the earlier days were 
splattered with the mud of self-seekers; while John Eliot 



STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP 25 

and Lord Palmerston may remind us that in the modern 
period honest gentlemen still went into politics, even 
though they did not always take much intelligence with 
them. But it is suggested that an impartial weighing 
of the evidence forces us to the conclusion that the 
general standard has declined. William Cecil, Lord 
Burghley, was the last English Prime Minister who was 
at once a man of long views, an expert administrator, 
and an entirely honest man who always thought of his 
country's welfare before his own ambition. It is inter- 
esting to note that this Cecil stock of honest political 
craftsmen, although it continued in the direct line, dis- 
appeared from the public political stage during the 
ignoble and incompetent self-seeking of the eighteenth 
and early nineteenth centuries, with their Whig oligarchy 
and all-parties' plutocracy. The Cecil traditions appar- 
ently could not live in such an atmosphere. When the 
direct line has again emerged with the revolt against 
"modern" statesmanship, it is worth considering that the 
descendants of Elizabeth's great Minister are gradually 
impressing themselves on the nation as being of those 
few members of the Houses of Parliament who have any 
principles or moral convictions beyond the selfish expedi- 
ency of the movement. It is a valuable survival of the 
older traditions of statesmanship. It may be the begin- 
ning of a return to a system when statesmen had not 
degenerated into politicians; when they did not start 
their public careers with the words that the young Can- 
ning — that most typical of modern governors — wrote of 
the House of Commons when he was eighteen; "The 

only path to the only desirable thing in this world 

the gratification of ambition." It would be no exaggera- 



26 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

tion to say that such a sentence has been the very breath 
of modern statesmen; and it has been followed to its 
logical conclusion with a selfishness that would have made 
even Thomas Wolsey hesitate. A lower order of mind 
has got possession of the trade of governing. Ambition 
may have its virtuous side: but there are worse things 
than ambition at the foundation of modern politics. 
There is the sinister purpose to use political and admin- 
istrative machinery to serve the interests of individuals 
and classes. Politics has become the trade of managing 
the State in the interests of the men in possession and 
their friends. Modern statesmen are so rarely judicial 
administrators — they are very interested partisans. Per- 
haps half of them are sincerely trying to do their best for 
the State — judging by the results, they must therefore be 
very incompetent persons. 



CHAPTER II 

OLIVER CROMWELL 
(1599-1658) 

IT is somewhat strange, at the first glance, that the 
Commons of the British Parliament allowed two 
hundred and fifty years to pass before they raised a 
monument in memory of the man to whom (if popular 
rumour can be believed) they owed their firm existence 
among our national institutions. If it were really true 
that Oliver Cromwell saved Parliament from a despotic 
dynasty that was bent on its destruction, then it would 
seem only common courtesy to acknowledge the deliverer 
in some conspicuous part of their House. But Parlia- 
ment, the symbol, we are told, of the freedom of the 
people, hesitated. At last, in the closing years of the 
nineteenth century, a private gentleman (with a distinc- 
tively foreign name) ventured to suggest that, being the 
happy possessor of a contemporary bust of the Protector, 
he would gladly offer it to the nation, that it might be 
set up as a memorial in the precincts of the House of 
Commons. The Liberal Government in office at the 
moment apparently felt a sense of embarrassment: at 
least it did not accept the gift. The donor waited; and 
when a Tory Government came into power he renewed 
the offer. It was accepted. A Cabinet formed by the 
Marquis of Salisbury, a direct descendent of that Cecil 
who had been the First Minister of the Stuart dynasty, 



28 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

felt able with propriety to commemorate an English 
statesman whom a Ministry chosen by Mr. Gladstone 
had hesitated to acknowledge. There was a good reason 
for this paradoxical proceeding; and the reason is the 
clue to Oliver Cromwell's life. 

By one of those uncontrolled gusts of fancy, beginning 
one scarcely knows where or how, the tale was started 
that Cromwell saved English liberty from the assault of 
despotically minded men like Strafford and his kind. 
The truth is very different. If it must be stated in a 
sentence — which is impossible, with justice — then it 
would be truest to say that Cromwell entirely agreed 
with the manner of Strafford's work. He completed it. 
He gave England an absolute central government. He 
succeeded where Strafford had failed. The fact that the 
one owned Charles Stuart for his master and the other 
looked to Parliament is of comparatively small impor- 
tance as a matter of political science. Strafford wanted 
supreme power in order that he might rule England for 
the good of Englishmen. Cromwell sought the same 
supremacy, and (complex though his character was, and 
hard to understand with any certainty) even the unchari- 
table as a rule are ready to admit that his end was as 
unselfish as Strafford's. They were not self-seekers in 
that vulgar sense which is perhaps the commonest mark 
of the trade of governing men. They were ambitious 
of power: they rank among the great despots of history; 
but neither of them used his power for personally selfish 
ends. Indeed, one was so unselfish that he gave his life 
in exchange for his ambition. The essential fact which 
is common to both is that they tried to be absolute, with 
the power of enforcing whatever orders they gave. They 



OLIVER CROMWELL 29 

were both tyrants — however amiable and altruistic. 
Strafford was the more timid of the two: he never exe- 
cuted a Parliamentary leader or drove a House of Com- 
mons out by armed force. Cromwell did both these dis- 
tinctively autocratic deeds — the latter he repeated several 
times. Strafford threatened to bring an army from Ire- 
land to put down resistance. Cromwell went much 
further than threats: he formed the first great standing 
army that this free land had seen, and spent the rest of 
his life in ruling England by that army's strong arm. 
Little wonder that the members of the House of Com- 
mons hesitated to set up his monument in their halls. 

After a few years of the rule of the democrat Oliver 
Cromwell and his officers, the people of England fell on 
the neck of the returning Stuart in an ecstasy of joy. 
They looked back on Cromwell's career with horror — 
for he had succeeded in doing what they had only feared 
Strafford might do. It was not merely that both had 
demanded absolute power and had appealed to armed 
force. For a nation is not easily shocked by that, seeing 
that most of the history of government in the world is 
the story of applied or threatened force. To call a man 
who uses force a scoundrel would be absurd; for such an 
assumption would put half the statesmen of the world 
into the criminal dock. But what England was entitled 
(and able) to judge was the use of the power when it 
was won. Without venturing into high philosophical 
arguments as to the ultimate sanctions of government — 
whether force or persuasion was its foundation — the 
people of England had strong, common-sense ideas on 
the question whether Cromwell's rule was more successful 
(that is, more agreeable) than Strafford's. Whatever 



3 o MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

the historians have had to say on the matter — and they 
have been writing and talking ever since — less informed 
(but more practically minded) Englishmen have contin- 
ued to declare that the rule of the Puritans and Cromwell 
was a far from pleasant event, which they do not want 
repeated. They have had a national jealousy of a stand- 
ing army ever since; and very few reasonable men have 
troubled, since Cromwell's great experiment, to propose 
republicanism as a remedy for social ills. If anyone sug- 
gests a republic to-day, one may be fairly sure that his 
elementary knowledge of history does not get as far as 
the period of the Puritan Revolution of the seventeenth 
century. 

Whether Cromwell was a good or a bad statesman 
might seem easily decided by considering the facts of his 
own life. But there are few men for whose measurement 
we are more dependent on comparison with others. The 
greatest event of his career was when he cut off Charles 
Stuart's head. Now, before it is possible to judge of the 
value of that act, it is obviously necessary first to know 
what was in that head. In other words, before deciding 
whether Cromwell was doing the best thing for England 
in killing the King, we must judge that King and his 
policy — and the proceedings must be of a more impartial 
kind than the drumhead court-martial that sat in West- 
minster Hall in 1649. Cromwell and his friends may 
have had as admirable intentions as they declared them- 
selves to have : but it is necessary to come to some con- 
clusion as to whether Charles's intentions were as good 
or better than their own; and, far more important than 
any pious intention, it is all-important to compare 
Charles's facts with Cromwell's facts; to place what 



OLIVER CROMWELL 31 

Charles had done beside what Cromwell did. We shall 
have to discuss motives somewhat fully, because Crom- 
well was one of those rather wearisome creatures who 
talk much of their inner life and their good and bad 
intents. But it must never be forgotten that in history 
the accomplished fact is usually more important than the 
best of desires. 

Of course, it was not a matter between Charles and 
Cromwell as individuals. They merely summed up the 
cases for their respective sides; and the questions at issue 
between them were some of the most momentous in 
English history. There are all kinds of smaller inter- 
esting problems : whether Charles was an unscrupulous 
liar or a martyr; whether Oliver was a saint or a hypo- 
critical intriguer. But such can be answered at leisure 
or left undecided. The main points in dispute can be 
summed up in the wide generalization that Charles and 
Cromwell fought to decide whether England should be 
governed by a Monarch or by a Middle Class. Put in 
another way, it might be said that the question was 
whether the nation should be Old England or Modern 
England. Charles was the last flicker of anything that 
might be truthfully called mediaeval in our history — 
though most of it had already disappeared under the re- 
modelling hand of the Tudors. Still, it was not alto- 
gether too late. If Charles Stuart had won, England 
might have slowly developed with much of the main 
structure of the Middle Ages left; as there were many 
traces left in Russia and Hungary and Austria before the 
recent war; as there are, indeed, traces left almost every- 
where in Europe, except in this land that was swept by 
Cromwells and Chathams. Even in centralized repub- 



32 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

lican France they have still one great mark of mediev- 
alism, the peasant proprietor. 

Cromwell, as against Charles, stood for all those new 
developments which were to make England modern. If 
he won — and he did win, in spite of the Restoration — 
then it was inevitable that the last hope of Old England 
had gone, and for generations it was committed to the 
new ways. Cromwell's victory decided that plutocracy 
was to have its chance; and we had the Whig oligarchy 
of the eighteenth century, and the very slightly different 
industrial plutocracy of the nineteenth century, as the 
natural sequence of the Puritan victory of the seventeenth 
century. Cromwell was the symbol of the new Middle 
Class of traders; that is, the merchants and manufac- 
turers of the towns, and the country gentry of the agri- 
cultural districts. It was a struggle between a Crown 
that represented, on the whole, the nation, and a privi- 
leged class which mainly (and naturally) represented 
itself. There were all sorts of side issues, such as re- 
ligion and class pride. But in the main, it was a fight 
between Charles as the champion of a mediaeval theory 
of government and Cromwell as the expounder of a new 
theory; so new, indeed, that it had not expressed itself 
in any concise terms. 

When the Tudors had ruled England for a hundred 
years, the older mediaeval system of classes had been 
crushed almost beyond recall — the King was left, the 
Roman Church and the nobles had gone. In the Middle 
Ages there had certainly been a central government for 
the nation; but if we moderns could suddenly return to 
those days we would think that the State scarcely existed, 
or even that it had been abolished altogether. Compared 



OLIVER CROMWELL 33 

with the central government of to-day, it might be said 
that there was scarcely any at all in the full prime of 
the Plantagenets. Then social law was mainly a matter 
of local courts and local customs, of guilds and manors; 
although the King and his courts and his officers were a 
continually growing factor. Yet even when the Tudors 
began their work of centralization, governing affairs 
were in the main conducted by Englishmen for them- 
selves, and not by the King's officers for them. The 
Tudors laid the foundations and the skeleton framework 
for a strong central government which was to control 
England from Westminster. But they left it undecided 
as to what form that government should take. The 
Tudors had paid more heed to their personal Ministers, 
to Thomas Wolsey, to the Cecils and Walsingham, than 
to their Parliaments; and it might be added that they 
sometimes paid more attention to their own than to 
either. When the Stuarts came to London as kings they 
brought with them, being Scotsmen, a whole bagful of 
philosophical and theological theories, which suddenly 
precipitated the main problems of government; when a 
less argumentative race might have allowed the whole 
matter to slumber and mature for many generations, and 
then reach a quiet solution. But the Stuarts were full 
of theories; and their subjects at that precise moment 
were unusually full of facts. The result was the Civil 
War and Oliver Cromwell. 

It has been said the subjects were unusually full of 
facts. This is intended in a very definite sense : for the 
merchant class of England had suddenly found their 
coffers and warehouses full of riches and goods. In the 
Middle Ages, society had done without the middle classes 



34 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

as they had come to exist in the days of the early Stuarts. 
To give one illustration of this factor: the East India 
Company was chartered in the last years of Elizabeth; 
it was one of the first clear signs of the arrival of the 
great British commercial magnates. In short, at the pre- 
cise moment that the argumentative Scottish kings arrived, 
the merchants found themselves a powerful class. When 
the Stuarts said they were supreme governors, by divine 
right, the merchants took up the challenge. They were 
beginning to hold the wealth of England; when the 
Crown asked for a revenue, the merchants did not want 
to pay, and demanded a share in the government, hoping 
thereby that they could make someone else pay the taxes. 
The Crown in the old days, when agricultural land was 
the main form of wealth, had "lived of its own"; that is, 
it had supported the burden of government out of the 
royal manors and the royal dues, with the help of a few 
simple custom duties and a light direct subsidy to make 
up the balance when a war was on. But when the Tudors 
made the functions of the State so much wider in scope, 
and when the Stuarts continued the process by developing 
the royal courts of administration and justice, the Crown 
had to ask for a larger revenue. It was not an unreason- 
able demand, for it was doing much more work. Besides 
this, the great rise in prices (owing to American silver 
and other causes) made the royal rents even less than 
they seemed on paper. 

The Great Civil War was fought over the question: 
Who should pay for the increasing expenses of English 
government? The question as to who should rule came 
up in a secondary manner. It is not without good reason 
that the schoolboy believes that the war was fought to 



OLIVER CROMWELL 35 

decide whether John Hampden should be compelled to 
pay shipmoney to King Charles. That was the starting- 
point; though the matters in dispute developed with great 
rapidity directly the first problem was raised. It is an 
unfortunate fact that the Great Civil War was not the 
pure-souled struggle for English freedom that the more 
imaginative of the historians would have us believe. It 
was, on the contrary, mainly conducted on the Parliamen- 
tary side by a rather sordid set of self-interested persons 
who either wanted to save their purses or, still worse, 
saw their chance of a successful career as political adven- 
turers. There are great exceptions to this serious charge, 
and Oliver Cromwell is one of them — but of that it will 
be more possible to judge after analysing his deeds. And 
there was a great deal of self-interest on the side of the 
Court, though perhaps less than on the side of the Parlia- 
mentarians. But take it all in all, the Civil War was 
not a struggle between a disaffected and outraged people 
and a despotic King. It was conducted on both sides by 
comparatively small groups of self-interested men; while 
the bulk of the nation looked on with apathy or disgust — 
which is the popular feeling about most revolutions. 
When the fighting began there were frantic efforts on 
the part of whole districts and counties to declare them- 
selves neutral — just as peaceful and respectable people 
in everyday life try to pretend they do not notice when 
drunken parties begin to quarrel. The vast majority of 
the English people would willingly have stood outside the 
Civil War; partly because they did not know what it was 
all about, and partly because they had a shrewd notion 
that it was six of one and half a dozen of the other — 
which homely verdict is the strictly scientific explanation 



36 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

of the majority of the great political squabbles which are 
discussed with such solemnity in the history-books. 

The sole question which could interest the people as a 
whole was whether Charles Stuart and his men would 
rule England more agreeably than John Pym and Hamp- 
den and Cromwell. Was a king's government worse 
than a parliament's? Enthusiastic democrats have 
jumped to the hasty conclusion that it is a matter of 
common sense that does not admit of argument. They 
assume, almost as a matter of arithmetic, that five hun- 
dred men must inevitably be more democratic than one; 
and clinch the argument by pointing out that the five hun- 
dred had been elected by the freemen of the nation. The 
theory shows a primitive innocency of the way in which 
public affairs are conducted. A little historical research 
reveals that the Civil War was in great part organized 
by Mr. John Pym and a small group of gentlemen who 
met in the City of London to further their own financial 
interests, and discovered that political intrigue was the 
best method of getting what they wanted. They cannot 
be said to have represented popular opinion; they rather 
manufactured it to represent themselves. Those enthusi- 
astic mobs that rushed to the doors of the Houses of 
Parliament, to influence their voting, were said by the 
Royalists — with good evidence behind their statements — 
to have been produced by Pym and his friends in the same 
manner that a theatrical manager produces a show on 
the stage. But whether the Parliamentary case was "pro- 
duced," or a free rising of the people, is a less important 
matter than discovering the intention of the Parliamen- 
tarians when they had obtained the supreme power for 
which they fought. 



OLIVER CROMWELL 37 

One can learn more about their motives by studying, 
for example, the story of this "Company of the Adven- 
turers for the Plantations of the Islands of Providence, 
Henrietta, and the adjacent Islands" (of which Mr. Pym 
was the inspiring secretary) than by reading any number 
of parliamentary speeches and petitions of right. The 
members gave the Earl of Holland one full share in the 
Company without payment, in return for the kind trouble 
he had taken in getting concessions out of Government 
officials. Nothing could be more typical of the attitude 
of the Parliamentarians. They were gentlemen with a 
keen eye for their personal business; and they realized, 
almost for the first time in our history, that government 
could be made a convenient tool for ambitious commer- 
cial men. They were not all like that: Sir Thomas Eliot 
died in the Tower, after three years' harsh imprison- 
ment, rather than retract one word of his political faith. 
For it was a faith in his case, not a business convenience. 
But of the men who went to prison with him for defy- 
ing the King, most apologized and said they were sorry. 
There was Hampden, who had also the courage to die 
for his convictions. And there were men who signed 
Charles's death-warrant at the risk of their own necks 
out of sheer conviction that they were doing justice. But 
the greater part of the Puritan revolutionaries were less 
interested in their faith than their profits. As Dr. Cun- 
ningham, the greatest of English economic historians, has 
sarcastically written: "Their attachment to their prin- 
ciples was not adequately tested by a contest which was 
the occasion of improving the fortunes of so many." He 
also has written a criticism of the Long Parliament, 
which our schoolchildren are taught to consider as the 



38 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

brave body that saved us from constitutional slavery: 
"The Long Parliament attained an unfortunate notoriety 
for the worst forms of political corruption. . . . Parlia- 
ment, by the confiscation of Crown and Ecclesiastical 
lands, threw an immense amount of real estate into the 
market, and some of the members were enabled to become 
purchasers at very low rates. Lenthall, the Speaker of 
the House of Commons, did not set an example of up- 
rightness. Oliver Cromwell earned the gratitude of 
honest citizens by evicting the gang of unscrupulous poli- 
ticians who were plotting to prolong their tenure of 
authority." It was at this time that Lady Verney wrote 
in a letter to a friend: "Everyone tells me there is no 
hope of doing anything in the House of Commons except 
by bribery" — so she gave £50 to the Speaker's sister- 
in-law. 

There was one earnest supporter of the Parliamentary 
cause, a Robert Spavin, who was a secretary to Oliver 
Cromwell. We find this instructive person writing to 
Clarke, in November 1648, of "that old jog-trot form of 
government by King, Lords and Commons. No matter 
how or by whom, sure I am it cannot be worse if honest 
men have the managing of it, and noe matter whether 
they be greate or noe. . . . The Lord is about a greate 
worke, such as will stumble many meane-principled men. 
. . ." Spavin was afterwards caught forging Cromwell's 
signature to passes and protections, in which this secre- 
tary was doing a thriving trade : and he closed his career 
in Puritan history by riding through the City of London 
with a large placard on back and front, explaining the 
nature of his crime. It is regrettable to think that Spavin 



OLIVER CROMWELL 39 

was perhaps more truly representative of the Puritan 
Rebellion than his master ever was. 

And yet Cromwell, had he been built for the part, 
could not have more completely summed up in his family 
history the Middle Classes that made the Civil War. 
Thomas Cromwell, the chief of the gang of professional 
thieves who burgled the property of the monasteries in 
the Tudor period (under the thin disguise of "reform- 
ing" the Church), had a sister Katherine, who married a 
rich brewer of Putney, Morgan Williams. Their son, 
Richard, to quote the somewhat generous words of Mr. 
Firth, "assisted his uncle in his dealings with refractory 
Churchmen." Like many other men who have soiled 
their fingers and their souls by dirty work, he got his 
reward. The priory of Hinchinbrook and the abbey 
of Ramsey and some of its manors became the property 
of this Richard Williams, who showed his great respect 
for his uncle by adopting the surname of Cromwell. It 
would be impossible to sum up more concisely both the 
real meaning of the Reformation and the origin of the 
new Middle Classes of the merchants and landed gentry, 
who founded themselves in English history on the spoils 
of the destroyed Church. Richard's son became Sir 
Henry Cromwell, "the golden knight," who built Hinch- 
inbrook House, wherein he entertained Queen Elizabeth, 
and spent his great wealth in assisting his sovereign in 
maintaining "the sincere religion of Christ" and protest- 
ing against "the devilish superstition of the Pope." There 
were obvious reasons why the man who held a priory 
and an abbey should not want the Roman religion re- 
stored; and the same reason held good in hundreds of 



4 o MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

like cases throughout England. It was a large part of 
the reason that made the landed gentry of England so 
patriotic in defending their country against the Armada 
peril; and it founded that traditional dread of Popery 
which was the basis of the Puritan Roundheads and the 
Hanoverian Whigs. For generations after the Refor- 
mation the policy of England was mainly dictated by 
the gentlemen who were in possession of the lands which 
had been seized from the Roman Church. It was the 
foundation of our earnest Protestant faith. 

Robert Cromwell, a son of Sir Henry, succeeded to one 
of his father's new estates, and sat in the Elizabethan 
Parliament to keep watch over the maintenance of that 
Protestant faith which was his title-deed. He married 
into a similar family that had also got its share of the 
ecclesiastical spoils; while his two sisters became the 
mothers of Whalley the regicide and John Hampden 
respectively. He himself was the father of Oliver. A 
simple family story of this kind will save much laborious 
searching after the causes of the Civil War and later 
events in our national history. It shows why Oliver 
Cromwell so significantly represented the men who 
opposed Charles Stuart; he was the great-great-grandson 
of the wealthy brewer of Putney, whose son became a 
county gentleman by grants of Church lands. To make 
his position quite certain, Oliver married Elizabeth 
Bourchier, the daughter of a wealthy City knight who 
had made a fortune in furs and then set up as a country 
gentleman in Essex. In other words, Cromwell repre- 
sented at the same time the rich trading class and the 
new landed gentry into which the traders had blossomed 
during the Tudor period. This is not a far-fetched 



OLIVER CROMWELL 41 

symbol; Cromwell was not an exception; he was the 
fair type of his party. It is an altogether significant 
fact that there were thirty-one members of the Long Par- 
liament who were related to him by blood and by mar- 
riage. 

Yet, in spite of Cromwell's family history, and the 
almost miraculous way in which it sums up the case 
of his party, the truth is that Cromwell was the least 
symbolic figure in the whole gallery of portraits of the 
Puritan leaders. He apparently really desired to give 
England good government; he was not anxious to get 
good bargains in confiscated lands. He certainly accepted 
from Parliament a grant of the valuable lands of the 
Marquis of Worcester; but he would not have been a 
human creature if he had been so modest as to refuse 
any reward after his astounding services to his party. 
But, more important than these points, he was not a 
believer in a parliamentary system, like Eliot and Pym 
and Hampden. It is the supreme paradox of Cromwell's 
career. Of course, he would not have risen in the House 
and said so: but one day when the Earl of Manchester 
(a real Parliamentary Puritan) got angry with Crom- 
well, he revealed in the Lords what Oliver had whispered 
in his ear quite early in the war: "My lord, if you will 
stick firm to honest men you shall find yourself at the 
head of an army which shall give law both to King and 
Parliament." The noble lord might have persuaded him- 
self to become general of a despotic army; but what 
annoyed him was that Cromwell "has even ventured to 
tell me that it will never be well with England till I were 
Mr. Montague and there was ne'er a lord or peer in the 
kingdom." What Cromwell said to Lord Manchester 



42 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

about an army was almost word for word what Strafford 
had whispered to Charles — and had been beheaded by 
the Parliament men for saying. If Strafford and Crom- 
well had not taken different sides they would have been 
the closest of colleagues. But then, bitter wars are rarely 
fought because the rivals disagree, but rather because 
they both want the same thing. In this case Cromwell 
and Strafford both wanted absolute power, and both 
thought that an army was the quickest way to get what 
they wanted. 

There was another matter where Cromwell did not 
represent this Puritan party. He did not bully the poorer 
people and make money by stealing their lands. On the 
contrary, his earliest fame was won by protecting them. 
In 1630 he was defending the common rights of the 
burgesses of Huntingdon, and made "disgraceful and 
unseemly speaches" to the mayor on the subject. When 
he moved to the Eastern counties, Cromwell soon 
earned the local nickname of "Lord of the Fens" for his 
defence of the commoners who were losing their rights 
owing to the reclaiming schemes of that earnest Puritan, 
the Earl of Bedford, one of the "Adventurers" and a 
friend of Pym. But it was really that despotic person 
King Charles who came to the assistance of the com- 
moners in this particular attack by democratic Parliamen- 
tarians. Cromwell was again on the popular side when 
the Earl of Manchester, the Puritan peer already men- 
tioned, seized the common lands of Somersham, near 
St. Ives. Manchester used his parliamentary influence, 
and the trained bands were sent to maintain him in pos- 
session; whereupon Cromwell persuaded the House of 
Commons to appoint a committee to hear the case : and 



OLIVER CROMWELL 43 

his appearance before that body "was so tempestuous 
and his behaviour so insolent" that he became one of the 
recognized defenders of the peasant class against the new 
rich who were buying up England out of their trading 
profits. 

In all these ways Cromwell, the leader of the Puritan 
Rebellion, was paradoxically unlike his party. But per- 
haps he stands apart from the Puritan party above all 
in that he believed in the Puritan creed; in his case it was 
not a political convenience or a mere family tradition. 
His religion was the chief foundation of his character. 
It sounds somewhat a ranting, hysterical thing in modern 
ears; and in its more emotional moments it almost seems 
to ring untrue. Yet, taken as a whole, it must be accepted 
as a historical fact that Cromwell's religion was deep and 
sincere, and that it affected almost every moment of his 
public life. We shall often have to believe this at the 
expense of Cromwell's reputation as a man of intellect: 
but that will increase our respect for him as an artist and 
poet and mystic. It is perhaps as a psychological study 
that this man is most interesting. If he had not chanced 
to get an immense (and unearned) reputation as a states- 
man, he would still have remained as a great example of 
that most alluring of all studies — the human mind. What 
are we to make of a man who won battles by first-class 
strategy and tactics and by the nerve-power of personal 
physical courage, and then wrote his despatches explain- 
ing them in the terms of a Methodist parson? What 
can we make of a man who professed to be fighting for the 
liberty of the English to do and to think what they 
pleased, and yet gave orders for Irish boys and girls 
to be seized as if they were cattle and shipped to the 



44 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

West Indies to stock the land as one would stock a 
farmyard? What is to be said of a statesman who re- 
fused to listen to French proposals for an alliance until 
they had stopped the persecution of the Vaudois, and yet 
allowed his own troops in Ireland to hang priests in 
cold blood, and cut their throats during the heat of 
assaults? There was no man who could enforce disci- 
pline so masterfully as Cromwell; what his army did was 
exactly what he allowed it to do. How can we measure 
a man who killed a king for being a despot, and then 
ruled England, until the day he died, by the sword? It 
is fairly clear that it will not be easy to find any psycho- 
logical generalizations wide enough to cover such a case. 
Cromwell has succeeded in misleading most of the 
people who have tried to make him intelligible : but that 
is because they have attempted to build up a figure of 
perfectly logical parts. In any ordinary sense of the 
term, he was not logical; and he only becomes plausible 
when we realize that his greatest gift was not his power 
to outwit his enemies, but a capacity for deceiving and 
outwitting himself. He was a great soldier, a man of 
great intellect, but before all else he was a consummate 
actor of the highly strung emotional sort; a man who 
could have roused the gallery at every cheap theatre 
where they like their emotions served somewhat hot. He 
could ride a passion with such fury that he could con- 
vince himself that it was a real fact. He could even 
convince himself against the facts. And for a work such 
as Cromwell had to do, the capacity for self-deception 
must have been very comforting and helpful. The man 
who saw the facts as they were would quickly have got 
disheartened; his enthusiasm would have dried up when 



OLIVER CROMWELL 45 

he discovered that he represented a rather sordid and 
selfish class, and that the men on the other side were as 
good, or better, than those on his own. 

Cromwell was an emotionalist who also possessed an 
extraordinarily good intellect. It is always a powerful 
combination, and he is one of the clearest examples of it. 
His life was a continual balancing of the one side against 
the other. But the emotions usually won; for although 
his brain was of marvellous working qualities, yet it was 
of comparatively small range. Cromwell had not the 
breadth of vision and of thought that hampers so many 
men's careers. Half the doubts and hesitations that hold 
them up to think — until they are lost — never troubled 
Cromwell at all. When he was perplexed he fell back on 
his dreams, and his dreams generally had their convincing 
way. That he was above all a man of emotions is proved 
by the story of his early years of religious doubts. Crom- 
well was so amazingly clever as a political schemer and 
as a soldier, that one is tempted to forget that the foun- 
dation of the whole man was a half-mad religious mysti- 
cism, which unkind observers would have been justified 
in describing as a mania. His medical men called it 
melancholia, and ranked it with other nervous complaints. 
In the year 1628, when Cromwell went up to London 
to sit in his first parliamentary session, the Court physi- 
cian, Sir Theodore Mayerne, made this note in his diary: 
"For Mons. Cromwell valde melancholicus." It sug- 
gests something sour in the psychological world; and had 
Cromwell remained a simple farmer, he would doubtless 
have been a somewhat tedious neighbour. But his career 
as a soldier, and then as the master of England, took 
him out of his narrow self, where it might have been his 



46 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

fate to live. But there is no denying the terrors of 
those early attacks; when, panic-stricken by the dread of 
death, he would call up the Huntingdon doctors "at mid- 
night and such unseasonable hours, very many times," 
as one of them wrote. Between 1628 and 1636 Crom- 
well's soul was a seething vessel of moral conflict. One 
of his friends told how religion was "laid into his soul 
with the hammer and fire"; and the sufferer himself de- 
scribed his victory over evil with all the ecstatic enthu- 
siasm of a Salvation Army convert: "I lived in and 
loved darkness, and hated light; I was a chief, the chief 
of sinners. . . . My soul is with the Congregation of 
the Firstborn, my body rests in hope. . . . He giveth 
me to see light in His light." 

It is of the greatest historical importance to know that 
at the moment of the outbreak of war between King and 
Parliament, Cromwell, the cleverest soldier in the king- 
dom, went into action with the calm, if enthusiastic, assur- 
ance of one who had just come to an entirely satisfactory 
agreement with the Creator of the Universe. To come 
to terms with the King of England, after such a treaty 
with his God, was not likely to trouble the Parliamentary 
soldier. During the rest of his career he continued to 
assume (to the verge of boredom) that he was always 
acting as the servant of the Lord. It was asserted so 
persistently, and with so childlike a touch, that it is 
almost impossible to think that Cromwell ever doubted 
the great truth of his mission as the agent of God. At 
the moment of his "conversion" he had devoted himself 
to the service of his newly found Master: "If here I 
may honour my God, either by doing or suffering, I shall 
be most glad. Truly no poor creature hath more cause 



OLIVER CROMWELL 47 

to put himself forth in the cause of God than I have." 
So it came about that Cromwell became a Puritan leader 
with a personal sense of religious conviction which could 
only be matched with William Laud's and gentle George 
Herbert's — and they were on the other side. It would 
be fairly safe to say that none of the leaders took their 
faith as seriously as Cromwell did. If it was really a 
"Puritan Revolution," then Oliver and the handful of 
his troopers were the most serious believers — while the 
rest of the revolutionaries had more material and more 
private designs of their own. 

It was when he turned to the greatest work of his life, 
the building of the "New Model" Army, that Cromwell 
displayed the complexity of his character, and showed 
that the most unbalanced of religious mystics could be the 
hardest-headed and the clearest thinker, and the most 
active of doers that England could produce in that tur- 
moil of violent action and assertive thought. His new 
army expressed Cromwell's two sides, his mysticism and 
his realism; and made them into a whole which became 
something remarkably near a miracle. He had soon 
detected the weakness of the ordinary soldiers of the 
Parliamentary army, with which Essex was attempting 
(or not attempting) to crush Charles. Mr. Firth, the 
first authority on the period, thus sums up Essex's army: 
some of his "foot regiments were excellent, but the ranks 
of his cavalry were filled with men attracted solely by 
high pay and opportunities of plunder." These were 
undoubtedly worthy representatives of the group of 
political adventurers who were fighting as earnestly for 
offices and spoils in political circles as Essex's cavalry 
fought for plunder on the battlefield. But these, the 



48 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

politicians and the cavalrymen, were not of the stuff that 
builds up a new nation: and Cromwell was simple- 
minded enough to imagine that a new national heart was 
not beyond reach of serious men. It was that for which 
he was fighting. 

Cromwell once told one of his colonels (who had 
grumbled at the appointment of a praying captain) : "I 
think that he that prays and preaches best will fight 
best." It was one of those remarks that seem thoroughly 
stupid in print. It was on the field of battle that it proved 
entirely true. Cromwell's theory of psalm-singing 
soldiers gave him the finest army in England; just as 
the religious mania of their leader helped to make him 
supreme among the common herd of politicians with 
whom he passed so much of his career. There is little 
doubt that, had it not been for Cromwell and his army, 
the Great Rebellion would soon have flickered out in 
indecision — perhaps a happier result than its fight to a 
bitter end. The Earls of Essex and Manchester, and 
their like, never intended to do anything serious to the 
constitution of England; and they were alarmed when they 
found they had raised a bigger storm than they could 
ride. They had never meant to win freedom for any- 
body but themselves; and these "Levellers," who talked 
indiscreetly of "all men," were regarded as a warning. 
Anyhow, Cromwell and his troopers gave the Great 
Rebellion a moral tone. Whereas, if Pym had continued 
to lead, it would have been little more than a legal 
argument and a squabble to decide who should pay 
the taxes. Cromwell at least raised it to the level of a 
sincere chapel meeting — which is better than the atmos- 
phere of constitutional lawyers and bank directors. It 



OLIVER CROMWELL 49 

was this religious conviction which put Cromwell and 
his troopers on top, and left all the unconvinced (and 
unconvincing) little men underneath. Clarendon (with 
that broadminded sanity which usually distinguished the 
Royalists from the narrower Puritans) summed up the 
position of the rival armies in this way: the King's he 
calls u a dissolute, undisciplined, wicked, beaten army" ; 
Cromwell's "an army whose order and discipline, whose 
sobriety and manners, whose courage and success hath 
made it famous and terrible in the world." 

If it was Cromwell's religious creed that made his 
army and his power, it was exactly the same religion 
that ruined his cause. For it was a dark and joyless 
faith. Englishmen would have borne a lot of economic 
and political tyranny from either Charles or Pym; but 
they refused to have their lives turned into an everlasting 
Sunday-school class to suit the tastes of a few persistent 
persons who were suffering from enlargement of the 
moral organs. Puritanism and Independency were the 
very best of creeds to take into battle; but for domestic 
purposes a brighter, more human, belief was necessary. 
England might have borne with Cromwell's major- 
generals; but when sour-minded Prynnes got hysterical 
because there were such things as actors and long curls 
and health-drinking in the land, then nobody was very 
indignant because Charles Stuart's despotic government 
chopped off his ears for his stupidity. Later on, when 
he abused Laud's ecclesiastical policy, they chopped off 
what was left of the stumps — and this time there was 
popular sympathy for him. But that was because by 
this time England had come to associate Laud with the 
restoration of Roman Catholicism — so the gentlemen 



5 o MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

who held Church estates were getting nervous about their 
title-deeds; and Prynne became a useful pillar of the 
Puritan party. It was the dismalness of their lives more 
than their political practices that made Cromwell and his 
friends intolerable and brought back Charles. 

If the Puritans had won, England would have been 
put outside the circle of European culture. Moral de- 
generates who put their swords through stained-glass 
windows and suppressed Sunday pastimes lest they should 
make men happy would soon have reduced their nation 
to barbarism. The difference between the Churchman 
Herbert, who loved everything that was beautiful and 
charitable, and the monomaniac Prynne, who loathed all 
that was charming and generous, was the difference be- 
tween civilization and savagery. Here, again, Cromwell 
did not truly represent his party — but it was just that 
he should suffer with the dogmas that he himself seated 
in power. He was never so small a man as to be afraid 
of the pleasure of life; and there are signs that a few more 
years of power in Whitehall would have broadened his 
mind still more. He was always fond of music and 
social recreations : he was a healthy country gentleman 
who loved a good horse and a skilful hawk. When his 
daughter Frances was married from the palace, "they 
had forty-eight violins and much mirth with frolic, be- 
sides mixed dancing (a thing before accounted profane) 
till five of the clock yesterday morning." And for Mary's 
wedding at Hampton Court, Marvell wrote some songs 
and put Oliver in them as Jove — a far from decent 
proceeding in the house of a strictly orthodox religious 
maniac. 

Just as we have seen that Cromwell's religious faith 



OLIVER CROMWELL 51 

might fairly be called the foundation of his military 
career, so also with perfect historical accuracy it may be 
said that it was his chief asset in political life. It can 
scarcely be believed that Cromwell would have had the 
moral nerve to turn out objectionable Parliaments by 
force if he had not felt an intense conviction of super- 
natural support. Here are the words with which he 
dismissed the Parliament of 1654, having first filled the 
city with troops and placed armed men over the House : 
"I think myself bound, as in my duty to God, and to 
the people of these nations for their safety and good 
in every respect- — I think it my duty to tell you that it 
is not for the profit of these nations, nor for common 
and public good, for you to continue here any longer." 
That has the ring of inner conviction, and not merely 
the bluffing of a political adventurer. And whenever he 
quotes God as his main supporter — and he was con- 
tinually doing so — on the whole he convinces us that he 
meant it, and that it was indeed the all-important factor 
in his policy. Of course, sometimes he made himself 
very ridiculous; as when, for example, on the surrender 
by Colonel Windebank of Blechington House, Crom- 
well's official despatch ran: "This was the mercy of 
God, and nothing is more due than a real acknowledg- 
ment. And though I have had greater mercies, yet none 
clearer. ... I hope you will pardon me if I say, God 
is not enough owned. We look too much to men and 
visible helps." Whereas the truth of the matter was 
that Windebank had just married, and was having such a 
delightful honeymoon that he could not be bothered by 
fighting. It was a dangerous faith that read the greatness 
of God into all the weaknesses of men. But take it all in 



5 2 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

all, Cromwell's religion was blended with the world in a 
remarkably successful manner. 

What was Cromwell's political theory? What was 
his policy? The truest answer would be to say that he 
had none. A few moments' thought will show that there 
should be no reason for surprise that such was his posi- 
tion. For when the struggle with the King definitely 
commenced, Oliver had shown no signs of any particular 
bent for public life. We have seen that his early char- 
acteristic was religious melancholy, and he was more 
occupied in saving his soul than the nation. By one of 
those strange chances that become important, this 
religious chaos ended by making Cromwell the best re- 
cruiting officer in England; and he found himself at the 
head of the picked division of the Parliamentary army. 
It was partly his artist's eye for the reality of facts — 
the capacity of seeing things as they are — on a field of 
battle; partly the great driving force of his religious 
convictions, which had now taken the place of his doubts; 
partly his native superiority of brain; all together these 
made Cromwell the finest soldier in England. During 
a civil war the finest soldier quite naturally soon finds 
himself the commander of the nation : and so it happened 
in this case. 

Cromwell suddenly found himself faced with the prob- 
lem of governing the nation he had conquered in the field. 
It was an embarrassing situation, and Cromwell never 
mastered the problem or escaped from the embarrass- 
ment. On the day he died he seems to have been still 
without any definite policy for the government of 
England. He had always been living from hand to 
mouth; faced with a daily practical fact which might well 



OLIVER CROMWELL 53 

have driven all theory out of his head. The urgent daily 
question was how to keep in power — how, even, to pro- 
tect himself from being murdered by the Royalists, or by 
the fanatical democrats who began to think that Crom- 
well was standing between them and the Fifth Monarchy 
of the Saints. Cromwell began politics with the elemen- 
tary desire to crush his Royalist opponents on the battle- 
field : he ended his career with the still more elementary 
desire to keep himself from being crushed again by the 
enemy he had once beaten — and still more difficult was 
the work of surviving the attacks of the men who had 
fought to place him in power. It was not really a political 
problem at all, in the sense of a plan of social construc- 
tion. It was almost a purely personal puzzle. As a 
matter of fact, Cromwell was clearly convinced that he 
was struggling for the good of England, of which he 
sincerely believed he was the most useful servant. But 
he was, nevertheless, a servant who had no time to 
attend to the most important household duties, because 
he was compelled to spend his whole time clinging to the 
roof to prevent its being blown off by the gale. Such an 
urgent necessity was far from conducive to methodical 
study of political and economic laws. 

Oliver Cromwell certainly had great practical wisdom. 
There was little that anyone could tell him concerning 
the mind of man that he had not already fathomed with 
one of his penetrating glances. Careful observers noted 
that he had a wonderful way of gathering information 
from others without revealing his own opinions — the 
most dangerous of all the gifts by which a politician can 
strike his prey. This capacity for common-sense and 
practical insight gave Cromwell the power to solve the 



54 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

day-by-day problems, as they arose, with considerable 
success. But to face the facts — instead of the high phi- 
losophy with which some of the historians have concealed 
Cromwell — the chief concern of this statesman was to 
persuade the army to keep loyal and to turn out what- 
ever Parliament the Protector ordered them to push 
through the doors of Westminster. Cromwell began as 
a military policeman and he ended as one. 

This man who set out to crush the King because 
Charles was a despot, found, when he had to act as 
chief governor of England himself, that the only way to 
proceed was by calling his soldiers into the House when- 
ever he failed to convert the members by logic. As early 
as August 1647 we 6 n d Cromwell dictating to the Com- 
mons (with twenty thousand men behind him) who 
should sit in their House; and the objectionable members 
had to leave on his orders. Of course, Cromwell at this 
time was not in official control of the army; but it was 
his creation, and Fairfax was practically the follower, not 
the superior, of his lieutenant. The next year came 
Pride's Purge, when a hundred and forty of those who 
were left of the Long Parliament were driven away by 
armed men, leaving a Rump of about fifty members. 
Cromwell said he did not know of this until it was done 
— which was probably a lie — "but since it was done he 
was glad of it, and would endeavour to maintain it." 
When the driven members demanded to know "By what 
law?" this had been ordered, Hugh Peters — the fanatical 
chaplain — informed them, "It is by the law of Necessity 
truly, by the power of the Sword." What he meant was 
that there was no other way of getting Charles's head cut 
off. Then came the brute force of 1652; when Crom- 



OLIVER CROMWELL 55 

well, sitting among them, told the members that re- 
mained: "I say you are no Parliament. Come, come, 
we have had enough of this. ... It is not fit that you 
should sit here any longer"; and calling in his troopers, 
he ordered them to clear the House. He hurled one 
epithet after another in their faces. "Some of you are 
drunkards . . . lewd-livers . . . corrupt, unjust per- 
sons." It was all probably true — but Cromwell was gov- 
erning England by soldiers, which Charles Stuart had 
never dared to do so thoroughly. Remember, this is 
already the third time that Cromwell's troopers had 
cleared the House of Commons. Cromwell was right 
when he declared: "Not a dog barked at their going"; 
for they were as rotten an assembly as England has seen; 
and their military ejector need not have wasted on them 
the pious words of half-apology with which he pursued 
them as they went through the door: "I have sought 
the Lord night and day, that He would rather slay me 
than put me upon the doing this work." 

There was nothing left of the Parliament by this last 
Purge; and Cromwell, after locking the door and placing 
the key in his pocket, immediately marched round to the 
Council of State and showed them the door also. Let no 
one imagine that the people of England had any objection 
to losing their Parliament and Council. On the contrary, 
Professor Firth tells us: "For a few weeks Cromwell 
was the most popular man in the nation." The army, 
being now the only ruling Estate that was left in practice, 
had to consider itself rather seriously from the theoretical 
point of view. It announced that "God by their victories 
had so called them to look after the government of the 
land, and so entrusted them with the welfare of all this 



56 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

people here, that they were responsible for it, and might 
not in conscience stand still while anything was done 
which they thought was against the interest of the people 
of God." It was a simple creed, and was probably sin- 
cerely believed by its expounders. But it had its weak 
places as a constitution for a democracy. However, it 
was still more startling when Cromwell, the "Lord Gen- 
eral and Commander-in-Chief of all the Armies and 
forces raised and to be raised" (it is almost oriental 
in the flavour of its style), called the next Parliament 
himself. It was a strange outcome of this democratic 
revolution that it should have reduced the franchise of 
English freemen to exactly one ! 

Cromwell told his Parliament — for it was his, not 
England's — that it was to rule the land (so far as the 
"Instrument of Government" drafted by the army offi- 
cers allowed) until the people were fit to elect represen- 
tatives of their own. At what particular moment in the 
future that was likely to happen, Cromwell did not men- 
tion in his opening speech. For the moment he seemed 
satisfied; and this speech is full of most enthusiastic 
hopes. "Jesus Christ is owned this day by the Call of 
You. . . . God manifests this to be the day of the power 
of Christ; having through so much blood and so much 
trial as hath been upon these nations, made this to be 
one of the great issues thereof: to have His people 
called to the Supreme Authority. . . . We have not 
allowed ourselves the choice of one person in whom we 
had not this good hope, that there was in him faith in 
Jesus Christ, and love to all His people and Saints." 
This was Cromwell's avowed policy and practice on the 
first occasion when he had anything like a free choice. 



OLIVER CROMWELL 57 

He chose a House of Saints. What followed was a 
tragic comedy. In a few weeks Cromwell was writing to 
his friends: "I am, in my temptation, ready to say, Oh 
would I had wings like a dove, then would I fly away 
and be at rest. ... I would hasten my escape from the 
unruly storms and tempest." Before six months had 
passed all the members who would not sign a resignation 
were turned out of the House by Cromwell's soldiers. 
They pleaded that they were fitly engaged in seeking the 
Lord — to which the colonel in charge of the eviction 
party replied with the curt information: "Then you 
may go elsewhere, for to my certain knowledge He has 
not been here these many years." If Charles Stuart's 
ghost heard those words, he must have rejoiced exceed- 
ingly. 

It is on facts such as these that we have to found our 
knowledge of Cromwell's political policy. It is obvious 
that the ordinary laws of sociology will not take us very 
far. Half the time they would justify us in deciding 
that Cromwell was a fool in a dream; the rest of the time 
one is tempted to label him a knave — which would be 
altogether unjust. What, in the name of sanity, are we 
to make of a man who was trying to save England by 
electing Barebones' Parliament? Nevertheless, nothing 
could have been more natural: Cromwell was a religious 
maniac and the general of an armed force. So he turned 
out his opponents with his swords, and put the best saints 
he could procure in their place. He did exactly what 
one would expect of a man who was acting up to his con- 
victions. 

A general opinion by this time had arisen that if Crom- 
well did whatever he liked (by armed force) then he 



58 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

might as well be called by some appropriate title. So he 
was declared Lord Protector by a written constitution 
which obliged him to call a Parliament and consult a 
Council of State. The Parliament was to be elected by 
men possessing property worth two hundred pounds; 
which, of course, rigidly kept it to the Middle Class, that 
alone held such sums at that period — for it meant a far 
higher value than the same sum would mean now. And, 
mirabile dictu, these men who had risked their lives be- 
cause Charles Stuart raised taxes without the approval 
of the nation, allowed the Protector and his Council to 
collect a revenue for ordinary expenditure without the 
consent of Parliament! As a matter of fact, the new 
Council was very efficient; and before the Parliament 
arrived the Protector got through a lot of sensible busi- 
ness; just as Strafford had done good work during the 
eleven years when Charles ruled without a Parliament. 
Of course, Strafford was a statesman and not a fanatic; 
so his efforts were better than Cromwell's, who wasted 
a deal of time over matters which only worried the 
troubled minds of Puritans. Cromwell and his Council 
were scheming to put an end to swearing and cock- 
fighting, gaming and adultery; for the last of which they 
enacted capital punishment — with the result that sane 
jurymen flatly refused to declare anyone guilty even with 
the clearest evidence; whereas Strafford's Council had 
spent its time in administering the Poor Laws for the 
advantage of the unemployed and the sick. But, although 
he had no great grasp of the problems of State, on the 
whole Cromwell showed common sense during his brief 
interval of absolute rule. It is fairly clear that he would 
even have tolerated the Catholic religion had it been 



OLIVER CROMWELL 59 

within his power to convert a more bigoted nation; he 
was much attracted by George Fox, the Quaker, and his 
creed, and many prisoners of that sect were released. 
But for a man who professed Toleration, Cromwell was 
hopelessly illogical. It was Vane and Milton, and such 
as they, who really believed in liberty of conscience, and 
declared that the Government had no right to interfere 
in any way with questions of religion. Cromwell was 
broader in his practice than his theory; but he was no 
philosopher to lead his country towards higher thinking. 
It is perhaps necessary that someone should restrain the 
public conscience within limits. In that case, if a ruler 
had to draw the line of liberty, it is probable that Charles 
and Strafford would have proved more generous con- 
trollers than Cromwell. Certainly, whatever we may 
think to-day, at the time in question the nation soon 
decided that it would bring back the Stuart tyranny at 
all costs. 

The first Parliament of the formal Protectorate met 
in September 1654; and its first movement toward demo- 
cratic liberty was to prevent one hundred of the elected 
members taking their seats. Not unnaturally the Level- 
lers joined the Cavaliers in pulling down a Government 
which was making the democrats look ridiculous and was 
filling the Royalists with hope. Cromwell met the situ- 
ation in the way one would expect from his character. 
He divided England into twelve districts, and placed a 
Major-General over each. And when from all sides 
arose angry protests, Cromwell had the want of humour 
(shall we say?) to ask one of the protestors: "Why 
will you not own this Government to be a legal Govern- 
ment?" To which question came the obvious reply: 



60 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

"Because it seems to me to be in substance a re-establish- 
ment of that which we all engaged against, and had with 
a great expense of blood and treasure abolished." When 
the democratic-autocrat asked with innocent ignorance 
what it was they wanted, again came a reply which 
would have crushed a more sensitive man: "That which 
we fought for, that the nation might be governed by its 
own consent." Cromwell's final question was truly 
pathetic: "But where shall we find that consent?" It 
was almost a sob of appeal from one who had honestly 
tried to find national safety and good government — 
and, instead, had plunged from one morass into the next. 
He was like a lost traveller trying to cross a bog in the 
dark. 

Cromwell dissolved this first Parliament of the Pro- 
tectorate the moment the time specified in the Constitu- 
tion allowed — it was almost his first regard for the Con- 
stitution! The second Parliament was called in 1656 for 
the same reason that compelled Charles to summon his 
Parliaments — he wanted money to carry on a war, with 
Spain in this case. But, exactly as in Charles's days, 
the electors were wild with indignation against arbitrary 
government (in this case major-generals, who were in- 
finitely worse than shipmoney collectors) ; and, against a 
national cry of "No courtiers nor swordsmen!" the in- 
triguing major-generals were helpless when they tried 
to control the choice of representatives. So many ene- 
mies of the Government were returned that again a 
hundred of them were kept from entering the House. 
There is not a single instance of Cromwell daring to 
face the members as they had been chosen by the electors. 
He either kept them out at the beginning or he had to 



OLIVER CROMWELL 61 

drive them out at the end. Never once did Cromwell 
rule England by the free consent of a majority of the 
legal electorate — not to mention the will of the whole 
people, though perhaps not many Governments could 
claim that virtue. 

During the rest of his Protectorate Cromwell was 
engaged in a subtle contest of wits, acting as the central 
buffer between the moderate Parliamentarians and the 
extreme revolutionaries; a struggle which took the form 
of the question whether the Protector should call himself 
King. Seeing that the Protectorate was being supported 
and controlled by the swords and guns of the army, it 
would have been almost a sign of weakness to revert to 
a monarchy; even William the Conqueror paid more 
attention to democratic forms than Cromwell was doing. 
It was, indeed, the moderate party of lawyers and 
merchants (and not Cromwell) who first suggested that 
the Protector should be offered a fully jewelled crown; 
for by this time they had discovered that it was better 
to be governed by one king than by five hundred army 
officers and political adventurers. Besides, Cromwell's 
system was turning into something strangely near a 
colossal farce. When even his own supporters began 
to resent his taxation, and he was told that " 'Tis against 
the will of the nation; there will be nine in ten against 
you"; Cromwell replied: "But what if I should disarm 
the nine and put a sword in the tenth man's hand? 
Would not that do the business?" It was the most 
haughtily despotic answer in history. It was magnificent 
— and in this case it was war. But, whatever it was, it 
was not popular government; and it was clear that the 
Great Rebellion must soon dissolve in laughter — if 



62 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

Englishmen had any sense of humour left after ten 
years of Puritan rule. They had started by cutting off 
Strafford's head because they said he was plotting to 
rule England by an Irish army. They were now offering 
to make Cromwell a king — because he had done what 
Strafford had failed in doing. 

Since, therefore, there was little difference between 
the methods by which Strafford and Cromwell (as repre- 
senting the two great rival parties of the Civil War) 
tried to accomplish their ends, we are thrown back in 
our judgment on the question whether Cromwell made 
any better use of his power, when he won it, than Straf- 
ford had done. Compared with the bulk of his fellow- 
politicians, Cromwell was a broad-minded man, both in 
his social and his religious policy. Nevertheless his early 
training had been narrow, and he never fully conceived 
of the nation as a whole; but, in the main, thought in 
terms of his own social set. Essentially he remained the 
statesman of the Middle Classes. He was not a man 
of theory. When asked by the soldiers to say what he 
thought of universal suffrage, he practically refused to 
discuss it in the abstract. He said it "did tend very 
much to anarchy"; and therefore he objected to Colonel 
Rainborow's proposal to give a vote to "the poor man, 
the meanest man in the kingdom." Cromwell would go 
no further than to hedge, as politicians have always 
hedged throughout history; he said he would be glad to 
agree to a "reasonable extension of the franchise." 
Colonel Rainborow had put the case : "I do think that 
the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a 
strict sense to the Government that he hath not had a 
voice to put himself under." For Cromwell to have 



OLIVER CROMWELL 63 

admitted such a doctrine would have been political sui- 
cide. There is not much evidence that Cromwell had 
very clear opinions concerning these social and economic 
questions. He went no further than a rather vague 
generosity that showed itself in the defence of the com- 
moners in his early days; but, taken as a whole, one is 
forced to conclude that he regarded his own Middle 
Class as the element in the nation that should receive 
the first consideration. Again and again through his 
career (especially in his relations with the radical agi- 
tators of the army) we find him apparently heading the 
discontented, but really all the while holding them back 
by his skilful handling of the situation. Indeed, such as 
Lilburn openly accused him of betraying them — and 
there was much justice in Lilburn's charge, as anyone who 
takes the trouble to read the evidence can see. Never- 
theless, there is this to be said for Cromwell: he was a 
man of superb common sense. He therefore knew very 
well that it was impossible to plunge forward at a greater 
pace than the somewhat majestic stride of nature will 
admit. As he himself put it, it was necessary to discover 
"whether the spirit and temper of the people of this 
nation are prepared to go along with it." 

Of course, Strafford would have been as contemptuous 
of universal suffrage and complete religious freedom as 
was Cromwell. Yet there was a very different basis of 
thought in the two men, spite of all their similarities in 
practical methods. Cromwell was essentially a states- 
man who would protect the interests of the Middle Class 
and the plutocrats. Strafford had a far wider conception 
of his business as First Minister of the nation. He re- 
garded the people as a whole; and gave more attention 



64 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

to the welfare of the poor than to the interests of the 
rich. The great historian of the period, Professor 
Gardiner, has summed up Strafford's character thus: 
" 'Justice without respect of persons' might have been 
the motto of his life. Nothing called forth his bitter 
indignation like the claims of the rich to special consider- 
ation or favour. The rule of the House of Commons 
meant for him — not altogether without truth — the rule 
of the landowner and the lawyer at the expense of the 
poor. His entry into the Council was marked by a series 
of efforts to make life more tolerable for those who were 
in distress." Now if that is an accurate statement of 
the position — and it is made by one of the greatest 
authorities on the period — then it should have the fullest 
influence in a judgment on Cromwell. Can his demo- 
cratic admirers point to any series of measures for the 
direct advantage of the poor, such as Strafford forced 
through the Privy Council? 

The author, E. M. Leonard, of the standard mono- 
graph on the early Poor Law in England, thus describes 
the position: "The years between 1597 and 1644 are 
in many respects a unique period in the history of English 
poor relief. A great deal of evidence exists, which 
seems to indicate that in many places, during some of 
these years, the whole of the Elizabethan poor law was 
put in execution, that is, work was provided for the un- 
employed as well as relief for the impotent. After the 
Civil War a part only of the system survived. There 
are thus grounds for believing that never since the days 
of Charles I have we had either so much provision of 
work for the able-bodied or so complete a system of 
looking after the more needy classes." This adminis- 



OLIVER CROMWELL 65 

tration was pressed on the local authorities by the action 
of the Privy Council; and Gardiner thinks that it was 
mainly due to the pressure of Strafford: "It can hardly 
be by accident that his accession to the Privy Council 
was followed by a series of measures aiming at the benefit 
of the people in general, and at the protection of the 
helpless against the pressure caused by self-interest of 
particular classes." The period when this policy was 
most actively pressed was between 1629 and 1640, pre- 
cisely the years when Charles governed without a Parlia- 
ment and was guided by the Earl of Strafford. 

It is altogether pertinent to ask whether there is any 
indication in the career of Cromwell of such a deliberate 
attempt to benefit the poor. The answer is that there is 
no such evidence. Did any of the Puritans take that 
keen interest in the all-important matter of apprentice- 
ship that was shown by the bigoted Churchman, Laud, 
who founded so many charities in support of this prin- 
ciple? Is there any exaggeration in saying that the 
Royalist administrators were far more considerate for 
the common people of England than the Middle Class 
Puritans ever were? If we must condemn both Strafford 
and Cromwell for governing by methods of pure despot- 
ism; if they must be criticized for shirking the first duty 
of a statesman — namely, to teach the people to take 
their share in the work of the nation — then, after con- 
demning them both for their method, we are thrown 
back on their practical results. And, on that basis, the 
Royalists might well be held as the champions of the 
poor as against their Puritan masters. Cromwell was 
no narrow example of their creed, whether religious or 
economic; but, take him all in all, one can only repeat 



66 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

that he was the main prop of the Middle Class pluto- 
cratic party; and, on the whole, put its theories into 
practice — so far as he had time for any policy except 
saving himself and his friends from being turned out 
of office by the angry opposition of the majority of the 
English people. Whatever the rule of Cromwell was, 
whether it was good or bad, it was hated as never the 
people hated the Stuarts' rule. 

In the matter of foreign policy also, Cromwell was 
still the faithful servant of the wealthy class on whose 
behalf he had (somewhat unconsciously) beaten Charles 
Stuart. In Ireland — for Ireland was still a foreign land 
— he was particularly the tool of the rich. Professor 
Firth sums up: "The basis of the settlement was there- 
fore a great confiscation of Irish land." It was not a new 
policy; for it was merely the continuance of the brutal 
methods pursued by Elizabeth's and James I's govern- 
ment to please the wealthy merchants of London and 
others who desired to get possession of Irish estates. It 
was only a European version of the methods of shooting 
blacks in Australia and redmen in America. Englishmen 
spare their feelings of humiliation for the ill-treatment of 
Ireland by refusing to read its history. Strafford had 
carried on this policy; though, being a man of genius and 
a gentleman at heart, he had made the country more 
prosperous than it had been since the English landed. 
Of course he repressed the Catholics, as far as he could, 
but then he repressed most people who did not spend 
their whole time working for the good of the State. But, 
being evenhanded in his justice, he refused to allow the 
Catholics to be ruined by excessive taxation under the 
excuse of penal laws against their religion. After all, 



OLIVER CROMWELL 67 

he believed in good government — not brutality. It is 
impossible to deny that he was unnecessarily cruel in the 
settlement of Connaught; besides which, he broke the 
King's word of honour that the natives should not be 
disturbed in that province. 

It is still harder to defend the rule of Cromwell from 
the charge of brutality. He went to Ireland with all the 
customary English ignorance of the history of the Irish 
nation. He was one of those emotional creatures who 
believe everything they read in the newspapers about 
the supposed crimes of another race. If there had been 
one atrocity by an Irishman, Cromwell, like all the other 
credulous readers, multiplied it by ten. Being obsessed 
by his divine mission to distribute God's justice over the 
earth, he came with the wild determination to punish the 
Celtic Irish for the late rising against the Protestant 
Saxons. His first great act of vengeance was at Drog- 
heda, which he stormed: "Our men getting up to them, 
were ordered by me to put them all to the sword. And 
indeed, being in the heat of action, I forbade them to 
spare any that were in arms in the town : and I think 
that night they put to the sword about two thousand 
men." Is it surprising that a hundred men surrounded 
in a tower refused to surrender to the English? — 
"Whereupon I ordered the steeple of St. Peter's Church 
to be fired, when one of them was heard to say in the 
midst of the flames, 'God damn me, I burn, I burn!' " 
Cromwell may write about the heat of action, but he does 
not explain why the most callous hunt for survivors went 
on next day until another thousand had been murdered. 
And we have to endure in our history-books further 
florid displays of Cromwell's firm conviction that he was 



68 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

serving Heaven. "I am persuaded that this is a right- 
eous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches. 
... It is good that God alone should have all the glory." 
It was evidently not the same Deity that was worshipped 
by George Herbert. Cromwell's God was remarkably 
like the tribal idol worshipped by many of the Prussian 
professors and sergeant-majors. At Wexford there was 
another slaughter of two thousand soldiers and civilians; 
and Cromwell wrote: u God ... in His righteous jus- 
tice brought a just judgment upon them ; causing them to 
become a prey to the soldiers. . . . This town is now so 
in your power, that of the former inhabitants, I believe 
scarce one in twenty can challenge any property in their 
houses. Most of them are run away, and many of them 
killed. . . . Thus it hath pleased God to give into your 
hands this other mercy." It is a very good example of 
Cromwell's manner of bringing civilization and the true 
religion to Ireland. But, after all, the temporary cruelty 
of the sword is almost more excusable than the persistent 
tyranny of the civil arm that followed it for centuries. 
It was Cromwell's conquest that really fastened English 
rule on Ireland; his is still the most hated Saxon name in 
that land. With the further ruling of his conquest he 
had not directly very much to do; and often he tried to 
make the rule more tolerable and more just: but, as 
Professor Firth remarks : "Justice combined with for- 
feiture and proscription, and without equal laws, was a 
legal fiction which had no healing virtue." Such was 
the policy of the Puritan Middle Class that Cromwell's 
strong arm had planted in Ireland. He must be held 
responsible in history for his act. He and his masters 
carried on the policy of Strafford with less skill and 



OLIVER CROMWELL 69 

with increased brutality. Gardiner sums up the Crom- 
wellian conquest thus: "When at last, in 1652, the war 
came to an end, three out of four provinces of Ireland 
were confiscated for the benefit of the conquering race." 
If Cromwell had done all this to-day, he would be 
called an extreme member of the ultra-Tory Party. He 
and Sir Edward Carson would be classed together as sup- 
porters of the theory that Ireland was created by God 
to be ruled by the strong hand of England, and quite 
regardless of the wishes of the native Celts. In a similar 
way Cromwell's colonial and foreign policy would now 
rank him with the reddest-blooded Imperialists of the 
Carlton Club and the neighbouring saloon bars. In the 
politics of to-day the Puritan Protector would be the main 
support of the Unionist and Imperialist parties. He laid 
the foundations of the British Empire — a policy which is 
not usually ascribed by our historians to the Noncon- 
formist or revolutionary parties. However, that is not 
the only misjudgment of the history-books. He was 
driven into an attack on the Spanish colonies for the 
same practical reason that has driven many new and 
unstable governors into foreign conquests — namely, his 
urgent need for money. For the first time in English 
history it was necessary to find pay for a standing army, 
which was one of the chief democratic rewards of this 
democratic revolution. The Spanish War was a delib- 
erate attempt to plunder treasure-ships and rich colonies; 
as the Dutch wars were waged for the capture of trading 
supremacy. It is a weak argument to plead that it was 
also a war against the hated Catholics — for had not the 
Commonwealth started its career by crushing the Puritan 
Scotch and the republican Dutch? When it came to 



70 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

practical affairs, the Puritans' religion was always the 
last clause in the drafts of their treaties. 

Cromwell may have wanted a republic and a Protestant 
faith; but the men whom he had put in power above all 
else wanted a flourishing trade. Hence the Navigation 
Act, compelling all trade with England to be carried in 
English ships, unless a foreign vessel was carrying the 
product of its own country. Now, seeing that the Dutch 
were the carriers of the world, and produced compara- 
tively little of their own, a Navigation Act meant war 
with Holland, although it was the leading Protestant and 
democratic State. The merchant generally leaves his 
ideals and morality at home when he goes into politics; 
and when this merchants' statesman had to weigh re- 
ligion against his masters' interests, then religion always 
discreetly gave way, often with many voluble excuses and 
explanations in the language of the chapels. In inter- 
national affairs Cromwell did his best to crush the 
Protestant Dutch; allied himself with Catholic France; 
and hesitated a long time before declining an alliance 
with Spain, the leader of Catholicism ! Every question 
was measured by its effect on England's worldly power 
and trading advantage ; and it was measured so effectively 
that, to repeat, Cromwell became the founder of British 
Imperialism and British Commerce. The capture of 
Jamaica in 1655 might be called the first stone in the 
building. It is interesting to read that Cromwell urged 
on the admiral in command by the information that the 
expedition was "for the glory of God and the good of 
this nation. ... I pray you set up your banners in the 
name of Christ; for undoubtedly it is His cause. . . . 
The Lord Himself hath a controversy with your Ene- 



OLIVER CROMWELL 71 

mies; even with the Roman Babylon, of which the Span- 
iard is the great underpropper. In this respect we fight 
the Lord's battles; and in this the Scriptures are most 
plain." The Scriptures had evidently not been so plain 
when it was necessary to crush the Dutch, the under- 
propper of Protestantism. It was to people his conquests 
that Cromwell ordered his son Henry to seize one 
thousand Irish maids and one thousand Irish youths 
and transport them to Jamaica. The dutiful Henry 
replied promptly: "We shall have, upon the 
receipt of his Highness' pleasure, the number you 
propounded, and more if you think fit." Strafford never 
quite sank to degrading politics into a human stock- 
marketing. The scheme was too tyrannical for even the 
Puritan Commonwealth to carry through, and it was 
abandoned; but that was not because the Cromwell 
family objected. 

Mr. Firth has pointed out that the Navigation Act 
of 165 1 was the first assertion that the Colonies were a 
part of the British Empire; for it assumed that the 
English Parliament had power to control the foreign 
trade of the American settlers. Cromwell enforced the 
clause which forbade Dutch or other foreign ships to 
carry alien goods to the colonists, who had to wait until 
their supplies were brought by an English vessel. But 
it was the Act of 1650 that really first asserted the Im- 
perial supremacy: for it forbade any trade with the col- 
onists except under licence of the English Government. 
The pretence was that they had been on the side of the 
Crown during the Civil War. As the Royalists sub- 
mitted, concessions were made; but at first very few 
licences were granted. Being a clever man (and not a 



72 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

dull fellow like those Hanoverian Whigs who lost us 
two-thirds of North America), Cromwell scarcely inter- 
fered at all in the internal affairs of the Colonies; and 
he made several substantial concessions by way of return 
for the home country's privileges under the Navigation 
Act. For instance, the colonists had preferences on their 
sugar and ginger ; the export duties to Jamaica were low- 
ered, and the growth of competing tobacco was pro- 
hibited in England. Concerning the Protector's action 
in India, Mr. Beer, in his essay on Cromwell's economic 
policy, sums up : "He was the first ruler of England 
who realized that the India trade was ... a concern 
of the nation, to be maintained by national diplomacy 
and defended by national arms," and this writer main- 
tains that Cromwell was one of those few administrators 
of this country who have tried to develop English trade 
by systematic State aid and diplomatic action. It is 
scarcely surprising, seeing that he was the chosen repre- 
sentative of the trading class that had seized power 
by the Civil War ; though the tradition founded by Crom- 
well was not to bear its fullest fruit until the days of 
the Pitts, those idols of the bankers and shopkeepers of 
London. Cromwell's triumph decided that England 
should become the nation of shopkeepers that was to 
beat Napoleon's nation of peasant soldiers at Waterloo. 
He made England one of the conquering nations of the 
world, whereas until his day it had been mainly that small 
island off the coast of Europe which is reputed to be one 
of the jokes of American geography-books. Algernon 
Sidney, who saw the events in action, wrote: "In two. 
years our fleet grew to be as famous as our land armies, 
and the reputation and power of our nation rose to a 



OLIVER CROMWELL 73 

greater height than when we possessed the better half 
of France and had the Kings of France and Scotland for 
our prisoners." 

If that be a true summary of the effect of the Puritan 
Commonwealth's rule (and it is surely the only logical 
deduction from the admitted facts), then it is sufficient 
explanation why Oliver Cromwell has such a brilliant 
place in our history-books. To all those who measure 
the greatness of their country by the square mileage, the 
size of its population, and the value of its exports and 
imports, Cromwell must be a magical figure. For he 
was the founder of our commercial and territorial Em- 
pire. To those who are attracted by famous victories on 
the field of battle, again this man must be very appealing; 
for he was a great soldier — one of the greatest soldiers 
of history. Those who are attracted by strength of char- 
acter and picturesque psychology must also be satisfied by 
Cromwell, who is one of the few men in our history who 
owe every fragment of their fame to their personal char- 
acter. What power he had, be it good or ill, was the 
lawful reward of his own strength of brain and power 
of will. Cromwell was not a great man's son, not a 
king's favourite. Before he was nearly seated in firm 
power he was already the object of jealousy of more 
powerful men. What, then, is his secret? He was not 
the favourite of a king; but he had the favour of an army. 
The history of the Roman Empire has taught that the 
latter is the more powerful patron. And Cromwell be- 
came the favourite of the army because he had the per- 
sonal convictions of a chapel lay-preacher and the brain 
of a genius. 

But these are not the usual reasons given for Crom- 



74 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

well's place in the history-books. We were taught at 
school that he was a great democrat. Then we should 
have been told that Charles and Strafford were great 
democrats also. Cromwell did more autocratic things 
in a month than his Royalist opponents did in a year. 
Cromwell as a democrat is little but a huge historical 
joke. He governed England by a standing army — a 
strange epitaph to put on the tomb of a man who is 
called a leader of the people. He is reputed to have 
saved the liberties of England from a tyrant monarch. 
He certainly beheaded the suspected tyrant — and could 
never once face a Parliament freely elected by the nation 
whose liberty he was supposed to have saved. 

The orthodox tradition of Oliver Cromwell falls to 
pieces immediately it is collated with the facts. They 
leave us a fine soldier, an honest religious enthusiast, a 
man of broad common sense, withal dangerously near 
the border-line of the insane; and, at least, a gorgeous 
dramatic figure for a play. But those who demand 
great statesmanship in a man who posed as a states- 
man; those who think that a national leader must do 
something more than overcome the opposition of a battle- 
field; those who hold that the work of a great politician 
must be able to stand the test of centuries, and not merely 
survive the enemies of a decade; all these will find Crom- 
well of secondary importance. He did succeed in influ- 
encing the history of the succeeding centuries; but it is 
open to serious criticism whether all that was permanent 
in his statesmanship was not profoundly wrong. Those 
who think it was a good thing to put the plutocratic 
Middle Class in power, by the displacement of the Mon- 
archy and the crushing of the labouring class, such will 



OLIVER CROMWELL 75 

regard Oliver Cromwell — and rightly — as their first 
great leader. Those who believe that the depressing 
creed of Nonconformity has been a factor in the develop- 
ment of civilization and culture, such are entitled to 
Cromwell as their patron saint. There are those who 
think it was a great deed of statesmanship to have be- 
haved so brutally in Ireland that Irish mothers, to this 
day, frighten their naughty children with the name of 
Cromwell; such will regard the present policy of English 
rule in Ireland as one of Cromwell's most enduring 
monuments. But those who see a thousand disadvantages 
in the modern England which Cromwell fathered and 
started on its career will be tempted to wish for a kinder 
fate which might have kept this meddlesome, strong- 
willed man out of our affairs. Cromwell was too like 
the bull in the china-shop of English history. There was 
a great breakage and clashing of plates. But it is not 
at all easy to see what good came of it all. It is too easy 
to see a great deal of harm. 



CHAPTER III 

THE WALPOLES 

IT would be quite reasonable to sum up the career of 
Robert Walpole as the first great modern English 
statesman (for Cromwell did little more than dig 
the ground for the foundations) ; it would be almost as 
accurate to add that he was the last — if we could forget 
the Disraeli comet. Whether the spinning Fates disliked 
the cloth of modern statesmanship when they had woven 
it; whether they hastily decided that they could not 
repeat it successfully, one can but guess. Be that as it 
may, just as there had been no one like Walpole before, 
so he had few successors who can rank as his equals. 
That blend of superb common sense with rich fancy; that 
delicate balance of rough honesty with worldly cynicism; 
that capacity for hard work and trivial pleasure in the 
same person; that incongruous mixture of the traditional 
Norfolk squire with one of the cleverest financiers White- 
hall has ever seen: all these strange contradictions made 
up a Prime Minister who stands alone in our history. 
Of course Walpole was lucky. This wholesome man, 
scenting of English wheatfields and turnips, came in an 
age when the moral drains of Westminster were in bad 
order : still more, he was followed by a period when 
English politics, mainly under the influence of the two 
Pitts, sank to a depth that would have made a far worse 
man than Walpole look bright and clean. To pass from 
the russet-brown virtues of this Norfolk squire to the 

76 



THE WALPOLES 77 

fragile conventions of the younger Pitt, is like going from 
the open air of a country lane to the hospital ward. 
He would be an indiscreet historian who claimed that 
Robert Walpole was a pattern of conventional morality, 
in public or private. But the difference between him and 
the politicians of the surrounding ages is the measure 
between health and sickness. 

As in the case of the Pitts, it would be missing much 
of Robert Walpole's significance if he were taken alone, 
isolated from his family. Like all healthy organisms, he 
was firmly rooted in his environment. He was no freak; 
he was the most natural budding of the family tree. To 
understand Robert, it is necessary to know his ancestors 
and his descendants. Like the Pitts, the Walpoles are 
the only full explanation of each other. We can no 
more sample their quality individually than we can test 
the value of wheat by picking out a single grain from the 
granary. And as their first characteristic, it was no 
accident surely that their stock had been unbroken in 
direct descent since they first landed with the Conqueror 
from Normandy; while Robert himself was one of a 
family of nineteen, as his father had been one of thir- 
teen. These Walpoles seem to have settled in Norfolk 
from the first; they had certainly lived there for cen- 
turies — no wandering people, but dwellers whose settled 
abode seems to have imparted a like stability to their 
natures. 

The birthmark of the Walpoles was faithfulness. To 
their friends, of course; for they had the honesty of plain 
countrymen; but still more important, they were faithful 
to the traditions of their race. If there is one thing that 
distinguishes this family, it is that steady clinging to their 



78 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

rudimentary virtues and vices that can best be described 
as faithfulness to tradition, as the survival of the essence 
of the general stock. The Walpoles did not become 
famous for any sparkling qualities that would catch the 
pen of a modern journalist seeking copy for his columns 
of gossip. Their reputation was built on a solid founda- 
tion that would not have disgraced a Roman wall; and 
the fagade that appeared above the ground was Norman 
in solidity, like their origin. They had played no sensa- 
tional part in English history. They had been squires 
and knights, and one of them was ambitious enough to 
reach a bishop's mitre, in the time of King Edward I; 
but even he could not leave his natural habitat, for his 
see was that of Norwich and afterwards of Ely, not 
many miles from the family home. There was nothing 
of the adventurers about these Walpoles: if anyone 
sought them they were usually to be found at home. 

When the Walpoles wandered, it was not for gain, 
after the manner of adventurers in general. Two Wal- 
poles, Henry and Edward, of Elizabeth's day, had to 
leave their beloved Norfolk, but it was because they 
willed to give up everything rather than surrender their 
Catholic faith. Henry dared to write a brave and deli- 
cate poem in defence of Edmund Campion, the Jesuit; 
and when Campion was hanged, Walpole stood by the 
scaffold; whereupon, inspired by this martyrdom, he 
preached his faith, until he too was executed, after many 
tortures which could not drag from his lips the names of 
his friends. Edward, his cousin, had been turned out 
of home by his parents when he refused to renounce his 
Roman creed; and when other estates came to him by 
descent, he sold them and gave the money to his Church. 



THE WALPOLES 79 

When again he inherited, again he refused to accept. 
Retiring instead to the Continent, he took orders as a 
Jesuit, and only returned to preach at the peril of his life. 
Even when James I pardoned him, Edward still refused 
to touch his inheritance. Of course it may be pure 
chance, but one does not come across these tales in the 
history of the Pitt family. Chatham's ancestors we 
shall find making fortunes in India, without much con- 
science, instead of surrendering them on account of its 
prickings. 

There were two really great Walpoles who still de- 
mand attention : Robert, and his son Horace — the 
former one of England's greatest statesmen; the latter, 
so great that he could not succeed in being a politician at 
all. They will both be far better understood if we first 
remember one or two of the contemporary outlying mem- 
bers of their family; for there is much value in corrobora- 
tive evidence from independent sources. There was 
Horatio Walpole, for example, Robert's younger 
brother; who was so close a repetition of him, that, after 
studying Horatio's career, we shall find it quite natural 
that the great Robert was honest and full of solid sense 
and very steadily reliable in any emergencies. For, after 
considering the life of Horatio, it is obvious that these 
things were in the family blood; just as it will be clear 
that quite different sorts of corpuscles must have careered 
through the Pitt veins. Solid Horatio sat in Parliament 
for fifty-four years, and for over thirty of these he was 
member for Norfolk seats. His politics were steadily 
Whig — for a Walpole could not be changeable, it would 
seem. That may not be always a pure virtue, but one 
wants to discover the truth about these men. However, 



80 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

Horatio was too active in mind to be an ordinary country 
member. His great achievements in life were as diplo- 
matist in many of the capitals of Europe; in Madrid, 
at The Hague, but above all in Paris. His chief char- 
acteristics were that he was honest and clever. That 
naturally gave him a certain distinction in his craft. 
When he was up against that slippery eel, Bolingbroke, 
in Paris, it was the steady Norfolk gentleman who won 
by sheer intellect and moral conviction, against an oppo- 
nent who had little of either quality. The flashy Boling- 
broke was a kaleidoscope of intrigue; whereas Horatio, 
when Townshend fell in 1730, declined the secretaryship 
of State, lest anyone should think that he had been play- 
ing his cards with that in view. He was always being 
honest before being considerate for himself. The King 
and Queen resented his frank letters, until they came to 
respect him, just because he stood up to them so boldly. 
One of his freakish fancies was a desire to avoid war. 
Of course, the idea does not appeal to the imaginative 
mind of the ordinary diplomat, for if there were no 
wars they would have so little opportunity for showing 
their peculiar skill in drafting treaties that will end 
them. We shall find Robert Walpole carrying this dull 
faddist notion of peace to such an extremity that the 
rest of the governing set arose in wrath and drove him 
from power; for the City merchants wanted plunder, and 
peace was ruining all the chances of the bright young 
men in the army and diplomatic service. 

However, all the Walpoles were not pacifists, and it 
is interesting to glance at another of them, George, a 
grandson of Horatio, just to observe how they acted 
when they did take to arms. His chief command was 



THE WALPOLES 81 

when he suppressed the maroon insurrection of 1795 in 
Jamaica. He did not want to use force if it could 
be avoided — being a Walpole, he was by instinct a 
gentleman — so offered generous terms if the rebels would 
return to their allegiance. These terms he persuaded 
the Governor to ratify. As it happened, only a few of 
the rebels came in; so Walpole was compelled to fight. 
Whereupon the Governor said the terms no longer held 
good, and began to exile those rebels who were in his 
power. Perhaps he could have made out a technical case 
in law for his action; but Walpole maintained that the 
merciful terms stood until the Governor withdrew them, 
which he had never done. What is more, the indignant 
soldier, feeling that his word of honour was at stake, 
promptly resigned; and when the Assembly in Jamaica 
voted him five hundred pounds to buy a sword of honour 
for his services in suppressing the insurrection, Walpole 
refused to touch the money and returned to England. He 
sat in Parliament as a follower of Fox, and was Tierney's 
second in the duel with Pitt in 1798. His modest biog- 
raphy is quite illuminating on the family psychology. 

Nothing could be in more direct opposition to the 
family history of the Pitts — to contrast them with their 
great rivals. The Pitts, as we shall see in the next chap- 
ter, were most things that the Walpoles were not. The 
Walpoles were peculiarly robust in body and mind; 
whereas the two famous Pitts were physical wrecks; and 
with mental qualities which at times bordered on insanity, 
in the elder's case, and, in the younger's, had many traces 
of degeneracy — he could not even carry his liquor. 
There is no record that a Walpole was ever sick in the 
House of Commons; and certainly they were never car- 



82 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

ried into it in bandages. There are such persistent signs 
of normal health in the Walpole family, there are such 
equally persistent signs of abnormal unhealthiness in the 
Pitt family, that a judicial analysis demands that the 
contrast should be carefully observed. Can the Walpole 
history supply such a case of degeneracy as Chatham's 
grand-nephew, the second Lord Camelford, who seems 
to have spent his life knocking people down or shooting 
at them? He shot his superior officer, apparently with- 
out any plausible excuse whatever; but being a Pitt, he 
was acquitted by the court-martial on his bare assertion 
that he was in command, which he certainly was not — 
and it would scarcely have been a conclusive proof of his 
innocency even if he had been. He was fortunately killed 
in a duel; whereupon his sitting-room was discovered to 
be a museum of the different bludgeoning tools with 
which it was possible to assault one's fellow-men. It is 
said that he had a kind heart; which perhaps was some 
slight compensation for an exceedingly heavy hand. 

Of course, it may be pleaded that all this has nothing 
to do with the Walpole family. But it is necessary to put 
them in due proportions against the background of their 
age, and it surely would be difficult to find any better 
standard of comparison than this other great family 
which was their chief rival. Besides, strictly speaking, 
as a subject of English history, the two family records 
should be made together, for they were a perpetual 
counterweight the one to the other. Just as we cannot 
understand a single member of either family apart from 
his relations, so it is difficult to grasp one whole family 
until we compare it with the other. And if crudity of 
distinction can help us, then rarely has there been a 



THE WALPOLES 83 

wider contrast in history than the mental and physical 
gap between the Walpoles and the Pitts. There is no 
possibility of mistaking the colour of a Walpole for an 
opposing Pitt. As to which is black and which is white, 
that is a question of moral taste, or the want of it. 

There are all sorts of fascinating sides to Robert Wal- 
pole that may seem irrelevant when one is considering 
him as a statesman. There is something very attractive 
about this creature, who had that sense of gambolling 
which the healthy man shares with the lambs of spring. 
He never seems to have lost the conception of life as 
something to be enjoyed — he was great enough to keep 
work in its due place, as something to be dealt with 
thoroughly and quickly, so that the way might be cleared 
for the pleasure to come afterwards. No one ever worked 
harder than Walpole; he seems to have shirked no 
drudgery. There is not a letter of his in existence that 
was written by a secretary; they say he even copied long 
letters with his own hand if they had to be sent to his 
colleagues. He was a wonder to his contemporaries for 
the ease with which he handled his vast masses of public 
affairs. And yet perhaps half his friends knew him best 
as the gayest of company and the keenest of sportsmen. 
The Wednesday holiday in the House of Commons was 
invented by Walpole in order that he might go a-hunting 
with the Richmond beagles. It has become a hoary 
tradition in English political circles that all great British 
Prime Ministers should open their head-gamekeepers' let- 
ters before their official correspondence. If Walpole did 
so, he was probably the only one of the lot who did it 
without a murmur of conscience. One cannot imagine 
him ever posing — even to his breakfast table and letter- 



84 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

bag. He was irrepressibly gay, and the boisterous shout 
of his laughter was a thing of which people wrote to each 
other. There is one of his own sentences that might 
almost have been the epitaph on his tombstone: "I have 
never heard that it is a crime to hope for the best" ; and 
again he said: "I put off my cares when I put off my 
clothes." 

George II started with the clear intention to snub him 
out of Court; and when Walpole killed two horses riding 
to be the first to tell him that the old King was dead, the 
new King coldly told him to await his orders from the 
Treasurer of the Household; there was almost the sug- 
gestion that he might not want another footman. Yet 
before long George, politically speaking, was clinging to 
Walpole as one honest man clings to another in a thieves' 
kitchen. It may have been the sense of self-preservation 
that made Walpole so attractive to his master; but the 
story of the Prime Minister's friendship with Queen 
Caroline needs less selfish explanation. The two had 
so much in common; above all, that most useful sense of 
reality — that calm facing of the facts — that is the dis- 
tinguishing mark of genius. It is, quite against the popu- 
lar opinion, also the most usual accompaniment of the 
higher imagination. Queen Caroline and Robert Wal- 
pole have gone down in most of the history-books as 
somewhat harsh materialists. They do say that the 
statesman's conversation with the Queen was not in keep- 
ing with the habits of orthodox society — but then the 
nice people have so often been dull, and the two people 
in question at the moment never tolerated dullness if 
they could escape it — the poor Queen had to suffer 
enough of that in the company of her honest husband. 



THE WALPOLES 85 

She probably took Walpole as if he were a little secret 
drinking. 

There was a delicacy of balance about their rela- 
tions; so far at least as the public eye could see. Indeed, 
there was amply sufficient reason for their friendship, 
because they so frankly admired each other's brains. It 
began at least as early as 1720, when Caroline took to 
gambling in South Sea Bubbles and Walpole gave her 
his invaluable advice, for he was most successfully play- 
ing the same game. During that year Lady Cowper 
was writing: "Mr. Walpole so possessed the Princess's 
mind"; and, "The Prince is guided by the Princess as she 
is by Walpole." Her ladyship tells us that it was com- 
mon knowledge that the Prince was in love with Mrs. 
Walpole, and that this was known to both the Princess 
and Walpole. It was an unconventional beginning to an 
unconventional friendship; which was to last until that 
closing great scene in their comradeship when Caroline, 
dying, committed her husband and his country to the care 
of her old friend. There is matter here for a modern 
problem play rather than a cold page of history, and the 
two chief characters of the plot would not be so lacking 
in the emotions as the history-books have written of 
Caroline and Walpole. It must have been a wonderful 
display of tact, this subtle relationship. Few people 
could have known each other more intimately; yet the 
Prime Minister kept the letter of the Court etiquette 
very rigidly; when the Queen dined with him at Chelsea, 
he only entered the room to serve the first dish — then 
dined himself with her household in another apartment. 
When he turned from Caroline's deathbed to seek the 
goodwill of the new favourite — "I'll bring Madame 



86 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

Walmoden over; I was for the wife against the mistress, 
but I will be for the mistress against the daughters" — 
then, of course, it sounds very shockingly callous. But 
it was exactly what his dead royal friend would have 
done; for she too played with her husband's mistresses 
as a chess player sacrifices pawns to win the game. 
There was more than cynical self-seeking in Walpole's 
regard for Queen Caroline. His flattery rings true: 
"If I have had the merit of giving any good advice to 
the King, all the merit of making him take it, madam, 
is entirely your own, and so much so, that I not only 
never did anything without you, but I know I never 
could." When she lay dying, Robert wrote to his 
brother, to whom even a Cabinet Minister does not usu- 
ally pose, "I am oppressed with sorrow and dread"; and 
when a Walpole put sorrow first he meant it. When it 
was near the end, the Queen insisted on seeing Sir Robert 
alone. It is clear from Hervey's record that the Prime 
Minister, usually so glad to speak of the honours he 
received in the royal company, would never tell all that 
passed between the two friends; while the King was 
as clearly fretting himself with jealousy. It was a subtle 
ending to a subtle friendship — which often ends in 
silence. 

There will be many who will say that these matters 
of private character are merely byways in historical 
affairs ; and that they should scarcely appear in the public 
picture. The theory might be debated with many pro- 
tests. In so far as history has been made by individual 
men and women — the vast bulk of it being, of course, the 
inevitable working out of the slow-growing thoughts and 
deeds of humanity — it has been the sport of the most 



THE WALPOLES 87 

trivial of personal characteristics. It is an awkward fact 
that history has sometimes turned because a man had a 
rich voice or a woman a pretty face. It is altogether 
essential to know that Pope wrote of Walpole that he 
could "smile without art and win without a bribe." When 
Bolingbroke, who seemed to hanker for Robert's head 
in a charger, wrote: "His greatest enemies have allowed 
him to my knowledge the virtue of good nature and gen- 
erosity" ; when Onslow said: "The best man from the 
goodness of his heart to live with, and to live under, 
of any great man I ever knew" ; when poets and political 
adventurers and the most judicial of Speakers of the 
House of Commons cannot forget that smile and that 
generous heart, then it is necessary to value these qualities 
correctly in the career of their possessor. They are not 
merely part of biographical gossip, but have a far greater 
share in scientific history than the stately historians 
allow. 

For what, in the name of all the laws of ethics and 
moral philosophy, is more fundamental in a man's char- 
acter than these qualities of bright charm and frank 
generosity? Will anyone seriously maintain that it is 
less important for us to know that a Prime Minister is 
generous to his enemies and loyal to his friends, than 
to discover whether he follows Locke or Hobbes or 
Gregory the Great in his political practice? The essen- 
tial facts about Robert Walpole are so often matters 
very closely connected with his private character. He 
was probably the most honest Chief Minister England 
had possessed since, shall we say, Anselm. It is one of 
the paradoxes of history that the chief battle over Wal- 
pole has raged around the charge that he introduced 



88 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

systematic corruption into political life. It would be 
nearer the truth to say that not one Government has been 
so pure from intrigue and corruption since he died. They 
drove him from office at last, Pitt and the rest of the 
yelping hounds who were seeking to get his place (and 
not to change his policy) ; but when they were strong 
enough to appoint a committee of inquiry that was made 
up of nineteen of his worst enemies out of a total twenty- 
one, they could find so little proof of Walpole's corrup- 
tion that the attack collapsed like a burst balloon. Within 
five years Pitt, the loudest of the pack, had publicly con- 
fessed that there never had been a good case against 
Walpole; a confession which drew from a proud son, 
Horace, this contemptuous remark in a letter to Mann: 
"My uncle Horace thanked him in a speech, and my 
brother Ned has been to visit him — Tant d'empressement, 
I think, rather shows an eagerness to catch at any oppor- 
tunity of paying court to him; for I do not see the so 
vast merit in owning now for his interest what for his 
honour he should have owned five years ago." Wal- 
pole was an honest man in an age when most politicians 
were more than half rogues. It is not surprising that the 
few honest men got the reputation of confirmed cynicism, 
and there is every reason to think that such as Carteret 
and Walpole were cynics because they knew the facts; 
and being honest themselves by nature, their milk of hu- 
man kindness curdled and became a little sour. 

Walpole was chiefly original as a politician in that he 
was neither really original nor really a politician. It has 
been the habit of statesmen to claim for themselves, or 
to have claimed for them by their friends, that they have 
devised some new policy by which their country — or, more 



THE WALPOLES 89 

generally, themselves — could be advanced in power. 
Statesmen think that it is their function to discover new 
laws and new social ideas. It is an entire misconception 
of their office, and has led to many disastrous results in 
the history of the world. The Walpoles were true to 
their family traditions of simple Norfolk squiredom. 
They knew more about the serious facts of life, the grow- 
ing of corn and the rearing of cattle, than any new- 
fangled theories of politics. As he was a younger son, 
Robert was sent to college to pick up enough book- 
learning to pass inspection as a parson. But even Eton 
and King's College, Cambridge, could not spoil his fresh 
intellect; though they gave him just enough impulse away 
from the Norfolk groove to make him take readily to 
political life when unexpectedly (by the death of his elder 
brother) he came into the family estates and the family 
parliamentary seat at King's Lynn. He sat for this 
borough to the end of his career (until he went to the 
House of Lords) ; and the persistence with which he 
held it is equalled by the steadiness with which he also 
clung, in the main, to the methods and opinions of that 
country town. 

The normal statesman, when he arrives at West- 
minster and Whitehall, rapidly fits himself into all the 
queer intellectual and moral nooks and crannies of those 
two seats of politics and bureaucracy. The small man is 
soon swamped by the strange ideas which pass for intel- 
lectual effort in this centre of the governing class. Even 
bright minds become quickly tarnished when subjected 
to the customary damp of the low-lying moral lands of 
Westminster ; it is not without significance that the district 
is built on a physical marsh. These dwellers have a very 



9 o MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

good case for themselves; they can prove, after a manner, 
that they are working out all sorts of new social ideas: 
they may honestly think that they have good intentions. 
But Walpole was big enough to be able to resist most of 
the new ideas; he hardly imagined one entirely new 
thought in English political life; he remained a very 
solid and very slow developer of national traditions that 
had been developing with equal slowness for centuries. 
As for his good or bad intentions, Walpole was not the 
sort of man to nurse his moral convictions : he was far 
from being an ethical valetudinarian. As a healthy man 
is unconscious of his body, so was Walpole happily uncon- 
scious of his soul. It would never have occurred to him 
to defend his political actions except on the grounds that 
they were plain reason, based on the facts. 

Walpole's uniqueness in English statesmanship is that 
he was a man of robust common sense, with few of the 
disabilities of advanced thinking. Like most people of 
this kind, he had a lively imagination and a delicate sym- 
pathy for the views of others — it is generally the senti- 
mental people who are selfishly unable to see any side 
but their own. They are too full of their own fancies 
to have room for other people's facts. Generosity to 
others is the very pith of sympathy; and that is why 
Walpole was merely amusingly cynical of the men who 
were yelping around him every day of his political life — 
when he might have crushed them with perfect justice. 
He knew there was little behind their cries but the desire 
for office; he knew their ideas were of very slight im- 
portance for England. So he calmly went on his way, 
expressing as best he could the simple theories of life 
he had been taught in his Norfolk manor-house. They 



THE WALPOLES 91 

were as superior to the claptrap of Westminster, as Pitt 
and his friends pumped it up, as homespun linen wears 
better than the muslin of a ballet-dancer at the panto- 
mime. 

Robert Walpole never got beyond the simpler tradi- 
tions; and it is interesting to see how he expressed so 
characteristically the virtues and vices of his age. He 
was only prepared to make the next step that naturally 
followed in the national career. He had little of what 
the sentimentalists call the "larger vision" — usually be- 
cause their mental eyesight is too bad to see anything 
more than an indistinct blur, which they mistake for a 
misty distance. Walpole could only see the facts within 
reach. And the most substantial fact to which England 
had come was that, by an increasing velocity, it was 
being made a great international commercial nation, in- 
stead of an agricultural local community. It was a Nor- 
folk squire, who had every reason to disregard that great 
truth, who was the political idol of the City of London 
merchants. He certainly had married the granddaughter 
of a Lord Mayor who brought him a good dowry; so 
he must have come into close touch with the City. Still, 
it shows breadth of power that this squire should have 
been one of the first statesmen who grasped the situation. 
As a matter of fact, the merchants as a class were not 
yet admissible in high politics, and the game went to 
the first landed gentleman who had wit enough to under- 
stand. Walpole was one of the first men with brains to 
enter modern political life. He made his entry into high 
fame by the skill with which he handled the South Sea 
Bubble. Most of England that had any money to lose 
lost its head as well as its money. Walpole himself had 



92 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

made a large fortune in the gamble ; and he kept his head 
as well as his gains. The people shouted for vengeance 
on the Company; but Walpole gave them what was 
better than revenge; he restored the public nerve. 
Which was about all he could do — for even the best 
practical sense in the world could not restore a burst 
bubble — not all the king's horses or all the king's men. 
Walpole had from the beginning prophesied disaster for 
this South Sea adventure; and it must have been a grim 
satisfaction that they should rush to him for salvation. 
The other man who shares with Walpole the credit — 
if credit it be — of making England's commerce one of 
the first considerations in political affairs was the elder 
Pitt. The vital distinction between their two different 
ways of treating the same subject will show each in his 
clearest light. Walpole realized that the merchant had 
become one of the main factors of the English State; 
and the care which he gave to the treatment of interna- 
tional trade was his best acknowledgment of this fact. 
It is a sound opinion that it was Walpole's clever finance 
that laid the foundation of London as the chief commer- 
cial centre of the world. One of the few original things 
he did was to open up the question of free trade, by 
taking off export duties on one hundred and six British 
manufactures and by removing import duties on thirty- 
eight raw materials. He foresaw a great Empire sup- 
porting itself, and devised a scientific bounty system to 
encourage colonial exports to England; and he added 
an extensive bounty system to encourage the home manu- 
facturer. That was as near as a Hanoverian politician 
got to economic revolution. All this, of course, clashes 
with modern free-trade theory; but even the free-trader 



THE WALPOLES 93 

generally admits that protection and bounties are often 
useful in early stages of development: and in Walpole's 
day the problem was to set English trade on its feet. 
This Walpole tried to do — and largely did — in a way 
that the thoughtless Chatham never attempted. The 
world was opening up every day with each new improve- 
ment of transport and with each voyage of discovery. 
Wealth in those days meant something very different 
from what it meant a hundred years later. After the 
Industrial Revolution, with its inventions of machinery, 
wealth was more easily won by building factories and 
producing goods. But in the days of Walpole machinery 
had not yet been discovered as the quickest way to 
a fortune. The merchant was more important than the 
manufacturer. If a man desired to be rich he had to 
send ships across the sea to the East or the West. 
Wealth was something that was more or less mysteriously 
produced in the Indies or America; when we possessed 
raw materials the time would come to turn them into 
manufactures. 

It is not surprising that trade was then conceived of 
as a struggle with Spain and Holland and France for the 
markets of the world. Cromwell, as the first great repre- 
sentative of the merchants, made the first feeble steps, 
perhaps; but in his days the fruit was scarcely ripe for the 
plucking. In Walpole's time the subject was urgent. 
The question in the City, and soon to be translated to 
the Parliament at Westminster, was how Britain was to 
insist on getting her share of the new world-markets that 
were every day more important. The critical decision 
as to whether we should go to war with Spain in 1739 
was the turning-point in the history of modern England. 



94 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

The City, backed by all its clamouring pack in Parlia- 
ment, demanded war. Walpole, almost sullenly, declared 
for a peaceful settlement, for a compromise at the worst, 
for peace at all costs. It was the beginning of the fight 
between Jingoes who were blatantly energetic to the point 
of vulgarity and, on the other side, the people who were 
hesitatingly compromising to the verge of courtesy. 
Robert Walpole was one of the few modern English 
statesmen who have preferred to be gentlemen rather 
than popular politicians. 

He saw quite clearly that Great Britain was out for 
trade, and he did not resist that development; for being 
so entirely a creature of his age and an acceptor of its 
judgments, it was almost impossible that he should have 
resisted it. His almost complete lack of originality made 
him take that position. But there are different ways of 
succeeding in trade; and being a gentleman, Walpole had 
very clear notions of what was legitimate and what was 
inadmissible in the world of commerce. It is perfectly 
good manners to compete with one's rival traders and 
take every opportunity of beating them out of the open 
markets by the fair means admitted by the customs of 
the age. It is altogether different to waylay your rival 
in the dark or attack him by superior force in the light, 
and beat him, not by better brains and better organiza- 
tion, but by stronger muscles. One can, in short, trade 
like an honest merchant, or one can live like a pirate. 
The two methods came into competition in the matter of 
the Spanish War of 1739. 

Walpole was too well informed, and too just, to forget 
that all the right was not on the side of England in this 
quarrel concerning the trade with the Spanish colonies 



THE WALPOLES 95 

in America. It was an easy thing to produce carefully 
prompted sea-captains who would swear (quite truly) 
that they had lost their ears by the slicing of Spanish 
knives — seamen who laid their hands on their hearts and 
declared that, in their moment of trial, they had com- 
mended their "soul to God and their cause to their coun- 
try." Any actor-manager could have done that even 
better than the Parliamentary Opposition did it in 1738. 
But temperate men knew that the sailor Jenkins, as a 
matter of law, had been caught smuggling; and that no 
mild measures would stop him and his fellows doing the 
same every chance they got. Spain showed every sign 
of desiring to be conciliatory and to come to a rational 
compromise. The right of searching for suspected 
smuggling was quite reasonable, especially when, in 80 
per cent, of the cases, the suspicions would probably be 
confirmed. Knowing he had only a moderate case, Wal- 
pole was ready to compromise, and began negotiations 
with Spain. He would probably have admitted the right 
of search. But the Opposition were not all gentlemen, 
and the City merchants did not want their smuggled 
goods discovered. So an outcry arose that turned the 
political arena into something approaching a menagerie. 
The Young Patriots, led by Pitt and followed by every 
loose thinker in Parliament, talked and orated as the cus- 
tomers of a pot-house would talk if they had been edu- 
cated at Eton. The sense was the same; it was only a 
difference of accent. Carteret declared in the House of 
Lords: " 'No search!' is a cry that runs from the sailor 
to the merchant, from the merchant to the Parliament, 
and from Parliament it ought to reach the throne." If 
he had not been to Christ Church, Oxford, at the end 



96 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

of this rhetoric he would doubtless have waved his mug 
over his head and led the rest of the pub customers to 
the Palace. 

It had come to the crisis; there must be a decision con- 
cerning the method by which England was to conduct its 
trade : by competition of merchants or by force of arms. 
Walpole got Spain to promise compensation for any 
injury done to British merchants hitherto; but, being a 
fair man, he did not see his way to insisting that Spain 
should surrender her right of search. Pitt, and his men- 
tally intoxicated crew, became almost hysterical: without 
this war he saw "nothing but a stipulation for national 
ignominy." Walpole's language drove the Patriots into 
a state of frenzy. The Prime Minister certainly did 
not tone his words to suit their nerves : indeed, his speech 
was astoundingly bold for such an age. Walpole said : 
"Any peace is preferable to successful war." Men went 
to prison for believing that during the last Great War. 
But Walpole was not objecting to a war of self-defence 
against a nation that had a philosophy of conquering the 
world; he was merely objecting to fighting on behalf of 
English smugglers. In short, he did not believe in ex- 
tending British trade by force of arms. Pitt believed in 
building a great Empire — if he had to knock down every- 
body who stood in the way. 

That is the chief difference between Robert Walpole 
and William Pitt. One refused to found an Empire on 
brute force : the other had not enough brains or good 
taste to think of any other possible way of founding it. 
Pitt won, as any man must win when he promises his 
nation the plunder of the world. But it must be remem- 
bered that even his own generation soon realized that 



THE WALPOLES 97 

Walpole had been right in this particular case; that is, 
he had been right (as he almost always was) when he 
said it was a bad policy to go to war with Spain. It did 
not need many months of war before they again began 
toasting the pacifist Minister in the City and in political 
clubs, where men are always perched in the watch-tower, 
waiting to see how the cat will jump — for the jumping 
of cats is the main foundation of political ethics. When 
peace was declared by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 
1748, the right of search was not mentioned; and if there 
had been no war with Spain at all, England would have 
been much as she was after wasting her men and her 
money. Walpole was one of the few statesmen who 
have always been on the side of sanity. 

No one will imagine that Walpole was a superman. 
That is exactly what he was not. He was the superbly 
normal man, with all the faults that appertain to hu- 
manity. He was not before his age; he was of it. But 
he was big enough to represent the whole of it, and not 
merely display a corner of it out of perspective. Take 
the matter of religious toleration. Being a normal man, 
of course Walpole had little interest in dogma. He 
probably could not have said the Creed forwards; and 
might have accepted it as placidly if said backwards. 
Note what Walpole did when confronted by the problem 
of liberty of religious conscience. He had seen what 
fanatics would do with the cry of "The Church in dan- 
ger!" during the Sacheverell trial. He had seen that no 
amount of reasoning would keep that sort of thing within 
sane bounds. So he decided that he would not touch 
questions of religion in Parliament, for the same reason 
that he would not have lit matches in a powder maga- 



98 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

zine. He would not have tolerated intolerance; but 
when he was asked to repeal Acts already on the Statute 
Book, he preferred to avoid the problem by a shallow 
trick. Instead of boldly repealing the Test Act and all 
the disabling statutes that weighed on the Nonconform- 
ists, Walpole persuaded Parliament to pass annual Acts 
of Indemnity, which said that dissenters who had broken 
the law were free from its punishments. It was not a 
heroic way of dealing with the problem; but it was most 
typical of Walpole's way of dealing with all problems. 

He once said, when the King was pressing on him an 
alliance with a Continental Power, "My politics are to 
keep free from all engagements as long as we possibly 
can." Walpole, not being much interested in the subtleties 
of thought, probably meant no more than he actually 
said in relation to the matter in hand. But behind his 
mind there was a profound distrust in all high politics 
and all administrative scheming. His was the position 
of the philosopher who has decided that the world has a 
way of its own that is not very much affected by the 
small flies that buzz around it as it whirls through space. 
The will of the world is so much more inevitably per- 
sistent than the will of soldiers and diplomatists and 
parliaments. Everything that one can learn of Walpole 
confirms the impression that, if seriously questioned, he 
would have laughed that he had ever worried himself 
over politics at all; and he would have given as a reason 
for his laughter that he did not really believe that gov- 
ernments and statesmen did much good in the long run, 
and that generally they did a deal of harm. 

It was, therefore, only natural that a man who thought 
thus would be very reluctant to plunge into a war. For 



THE WALPOLES 99 

one did not have to be a Chancellor of the Exchequer to 
see that wars were very expensive; if he could not see 
any ultimate gain at the end, when they were won or lost, 
then naturally there could be very little reason for fighting 
at all. If Walpole was a pacifist — and there is scarcely 
any other term which will cover that side of him — it was 
for the very ordinary reason that he did not believe that 
it paid to fight. It is perfectly true to say that if this was 
the basis of his objection to the war with Spain, then he 
was no more high-minded than the self-seeking merchants 
who shrieked for war because they did think it paid them 
as merchants. They thought it was the quickest way of 
crushing their rivals, the Spanish merchants. While 
Walpole was just as sure that it was not the quickest way. 
Now, in these questions of political judgment, it is well to 
be very practical and even materialist. It is well, in short, 
to first decide which side is right in matters of fact, before 
one tries to discover which is right in point of ethics. 
Now, in this case, the City merchants very quickly began 
to see that Walpole was right and they were wrong. Not 
long after he had been driven out of office because he was 
considered to be conducting the war with insufficient 
energy (and for many other reasons, all bound up with 
the Opposition's desire for office), not long after that, 
the men who had shrieked for war began to agree that 
the man who had refused to wage it should be made a 
duke. 

Walpole, as already suggested, would probably have 
put his dislike to war no higher than its expense and want 
of satisfactory results. But he cannot escape the charge 
of higher-thinking so easily as that. He thought thus in 
matters of practice because he had the healthy mind which 



ioo MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

thinks rightly without always knowing it. The Norfolk 
squire had not been contaminated by the conventional 
thinking of the capital city. It is said that there is only 
one people in the world that always speaks the truth: a 
very primitive tribe of India — one, indeed, of the most 
primitive tribes in the world. It sounds very com- 
mendable and to their praise : but wise men have discov- 
ered an explanation, in that these people are so simple- 
minded that they cannot think of a lie. It needs too 
great a stretch of imagination, and their minds will not 
reach so far. Cynics may say that if Walpole was honest 
it was because he was only a countryman, untrained in 
the niceties of life in London. It is doubtful whether 
the theory would have satisfied some of his opponents 
when he had finished with them during a debate in the 
House. The man who could make them smart with his 
irony and tingle with his logic scarcely fulfils all the 
specifications of the rustic. 

If this simple country nature explains some of Wal- 
pole's virtues, it certainly helps us with his failings — he 
had nothing that a just critic could call a vice. Of 
course his sexual morals were not in harmony with the 
written codes of to-day; but they were not very different 
from the unwritten rules of his own time, or indeed any 
time. Certainly, what there is to know of this side of 
him need be no secret; for he was as frank about his 
love affairs as when he discussed his political policy in 
the Houses. He was as proud of his private conquests 
as he was of his victories in diplomacy; and they say 
he talked of them as brilliantly at the dinner table as 
he talked of his other successes in the Parliament 
Chamber. Some critics will say that William Pitt, Earl 



THE WALPOLES 101 

of Chatham, was a greater statesman than Walpole, be- 
cause he devoted his whole career to conquering the 
world; whereas his great predecessor spent time in gal- 
lantry and sport and good company. The time may come 
when a wiser generation will agree with Arthur Young's 
answer to the French peasant who grumbled because 
Louis XV had spent so much money in building a fine 
house for his lady of that neighbourhood. To whom 
Young replied that, after all, it was cheaper to support 
the mistresses of the French King than to pay for Fred- 
erick, the Great's mistress — an army which cost too 
many lives and livres to count. So, likewise, a wise 
people might have decided that it was cheaper to pay the 
bill of Walpole's generous hospitalities than to find the 
hundred millions to pay for the Pitts' wars. Anyhow, 
such is the fact; for good or evil, Walpole was a man of 
generous living, while Chatham was a model for the 
strictest of the chapels. We shall find later that the 
example does not seem to have been altogether bad in 
the gay man's family. For whereas Walpole's son, 
Horace, was one of the most delightful men of his genera- 
tion, Chatham's son and heir was as big a fool, or worse, 
as the period produced. Walpole was not particularly 
happy with his wife; but he seems to have claimed no 
liberty for himself which he did not consider hers also; 
of which she would appear to have taken full advantage, 
until it was even rumoured that Horace was not his own 
son. Immediately on her death Robert married his 
mistress; and it is altogether typical of his frankness that, 
on his elevation to the peerage, he asked the King to 
legitimize their child and give her the full rank of an 
earl's daughter. These Walpoles were not, like the Pitts, 



io2 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

always hunting fortunes and titles, so the girl married an 
illegitimate son of Anne Oldfield by one of the Churchills. 
As for Walpole, when his second wife died shortly after 
the marriage, he was overwhelmed by the loss, and de- 
clared that she was "indispensable to his happiness." 
Which little piece of private history is one of many indi- 
cations that this cleverest of men never allowed the 
pomps of his high office to crush one nerve of that private 
individuality which only the big minds treasure; which 
the little men allow to be crushed by the conceits of their 
public lives. It is an important historical fact that Robert 
Walpole had one of the frankest, most open natures that 
ever became Chief Minister of the English people; and 
so it happens that for once the nation had a governor 
who more often thought as a man than as a politician. 
That fact will supply the key to much of his policy. His 
first impulse was to be frank and open, and to apply 
common sense before he fell back on subtlety. That may 
be the reason why he was never really a popular man 
in political circles: he did not play the rules they had 
learned so carefully. They were always afraid, probably, 
that he would give the game away. 

However, politicians never had a more generous op- 
ponent than Walpole. He never deeply resented their 
tricky or their low motives and their continual posing of 
public ideals and cleverer ideas, when all they were 
thinking of was higher offices. He knew they all had 
their price. But being so completely a man of his age, 
Walpole thought that offices were legitimate pursuits in 
public life. Did he not quite freely distribute offices to 
his own family? He probably scarcely gave it a thought 
whether it was right or wrong. The offices were there, 



THE WALPOLES 103 

and as somebody would fill them, it seemed perfectly 
natural that they should be one of the perquisites of his 
position. Here again there was no originality about 
this man : it never entered his head that the Constitution 
and all its machinery should be reformed on the latest 
scientific and ethical principles; for much the same reason 
that it never entered his head to discuss the other prob- 
lems of modern science. They had not arrived in his 
time above the threshold of the human consciousness. It 
was quite another matter when men spent their whole 
time seeking for office, playing the cards of their public 
policy just as it suited their own hand. There is little 
evidence that Walpole ever played this mean game, which 
most of his contemporaries were following so recklessly. 
In his early days Walpole once or twice may be proved 
guilty of supporting in office what he had attacked out 
of office. But compared with the record of the Young 
Patriots, and especially Pitt, Walpole was consistency 
itself. And, after all, it is more important to estimate 
the value of his work when he got office. When he was 
in power, did he do well or ill? Did he do better or 
worse than Pitt, for example? 

Whether the Hanoverians were better kings than the 
Stuarts may be an open question, but there is little doubt 
that Walpole made the new dynasty secure. These early 
Georges have scarcely received their full credit in history; 
they had many weak points, but they were more honour- 
able and far more intelligent in practical affairs than most 
of the English politicians with whom they had to work. 
Even George III, who began by being conceited and 
ignorant and ended by being a lunatic, at least was full 
of good intentions. Naturally these kings had little 



104 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

respect for the office-seekers who hung round all the 
doors of the Palace. It is not surprising that George II 
burst into tears when he was compelled to accept the 
resignation of Walpole : for he was the very keystone of 
his monarchy. But it is clear that there was more than 
this selfish thought in the King's mind; to himself and 
the late Queen Walpole had become a friend. They liked 
him because he was sensible : if there was one thing they 
could not stand it was sentiment — especially when it rang 
as false as a bad coin. When the great struggle was 
proceeding for the Excise Bill, they stood by the bat- 
tered Minister until he himself desired to give way. They 
flatly refused to accept his offer to resign when they 
pleased; the Queen was astonished that he could think 
them capable of deserting him; and the King had tears 
in his eyes — poor fellow, of course, he was a German, 
and therefore very emotional. When Lord Stair came to 
put the case of the Opposition to the Queen, she listened 
patiently to his arguments against Walpole; but when 
the Scotchman began to plead his conscience, the Queen 
could stand no more: "Oh, my Lord, don't talk to me 
of conscience ; you will make me faint. . . . Do you, my 
Lord, pretend to talk of the opinion of electors having 
any influence on the elected ? . . . To talk in the patriotic 
strain you have done to me on this occasion can move me, 
my Lord, to nothing but laughter"; and then she gave 
him very freely of her mind on his "patriotism" and his 
political friends; and classified, in particular, Bolingbroke 
and Carteret as "two of the greatest liars and knaves in 
any country," which was probably true of the former, 
if not of the latter. The episode explains a great deal 
about Walpole. He was a man who never bored any- 



THE WALPOLES 105 

body by false sentiments, or indeed by sentiments of any 
kind. He only discussed the practical affairs of worldly 
facts. The deeper things — of which he had many in his 
nature — he kept to himself, like most well-bred and 
artistic people. He was not a third-rate melodramatist, 
like the elder Pitt. 

Walpole kept the Hanoverians in power because he 
considered them honest and good for his country; they 
kept him in power for twenty years because he also was 
honest and good for the nation. It was one of the most 
rational political arrangements that has occurred in our 
history, perhaps more founded on reason than any other. 
Walpole was in power because he was the best man 
for the work: Pitt the elder climbed into supreme office 
because he made such a noise that everybody was only 
too glad to get peace by giving the baby the cake. 

Just as Walpole appeared to have no philosophical 
views on the matter of Constitutions in the abstract, so 
it would be equally vain to search in his records for any 
modern notions of social reform. It simply had not 
arrived in practical life. This was partly because the 
people were not yet sufficiently degraded to make reform 
an urgent need — as it is needed to-day after a few gen- 
erations of government by Pitts and Peels and Glad- 
stones. In Walpole's day there were still yeomen who 
owned their farms and cottagers who had the rights of 
common. There were, of course, too many evils calling 
for redress; and it is no use pretending that Walpole's 
ears were tuned to such cries. He frankly accepted the 
system as it was and endeavoured to make the best of it 
for everybody. He had got no further than a firm belief 
that if Englishmen were to become prosperous it must 



106 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

be by the exertions of the merchant class, who seemed 
to hold the key to the economic position. Walpole, there- 
fore, threw his financial skill into scheming for the ad- 
vancement of this class. To-day it would be fair to say 
that such a policy would be purely plutocratic. But we 
must remember that at the beginning of the seventeen- 
hundreds the gulf between Capital and Labour had not 
been made. Walpole had still some excuse for thinking 
of the nation as a whole. Besides, it is by no means as 
certain as some ardent natures imagine that it is possible 
to do much more than accept the system that nature is 
slowly evolving for us. Anyhow, most of the great re- 
forms which have been trumpeted so loudly turn out on 
trial to be very disappointing. Perhaps Walpole talked 
little of "reform," not because he was callous about evil, 
but because he was too wise and honest to hold out as 
hopes what he believed to be dreams. But we must 
construe his silence on such matters as we please. At 
least, it remains a silence, and Walpole added little or 
nothing to the legislation of social reform. 

There has been much discussion concerning Walpole's 
place in constitutional history. He is said to have 
founded the Cabinet system, and to have made the House 
of Commons supreme in the State. He probably did 
both. But it is dangerously superficial to attach most 
importance to this aspect of the statesman. For both 
accomplishments were almost accidents, so far as he was 
concerned; it is doubtful if he had many theories on the 
subject; though he recognized the fact, as is proved 
by his refusing a peerage in 1723, and passing the offer 
to his eldest son. It was only when he knew his career 
had ended that he left the Commons for the Lords; 



THE WALPOLES 107 

and, as he told Pulteney, who had become Earl of Bath 
(and ruined his political chances), "You and I are now 
two as insignificant men as any in England." Now it was 
different in the case of Chatham, who was always declaim- 
ing in rounded periods on the voice of the nation and 
the liberty of man. Since the House of Commons was 
not particularly favourable to Pitt, of course he had to 
invent a new supreme authority which he called "The 
People"; which led to that famous snub when he was 
pleading a vote of the Commons in favour of Admiral 
Byng's pardon. "Mr. Pitt," snapped the King, "you 
have taught me to look for the sense of my subjects 
in another place than the House of Commons." But 
Walpole had no theories of these kinds. If under his 
rule the Commons and the Cabinet became the chief 
elements in the Constitution, it was just because he him- 
self was by far the cleverest and most active man in the 
Government, and he happened to be in the Commons, 
instead of the Lords; while, naturally, no one could stand 
him in the Cabinet because he worked harder than any 
of the rest and had better brains than they had. Thus, 
by accident, wherever Walpole was became the important 
place; and the supremacy of the Commons, and a Cabinet 
united more or less absolutely under a Chief Minister, 
were the outcome of Walpole's long years of rule. 

But is the result anything to pride ourselves on to-day? 
Granting the argument that Walpole gave us the Cabinet 
and the Commons, can we still be sure that it was a great 
deed in constitution-building? The House of Commons 
has become the fortress of plutocracy; and the united 
Cabinet is the very heart of the corrupt Party system. 
Do we find either of these exceedingly admirable now? 



108 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

Cannot we imagine other developments that might have 
been very much better for this country? Would frank, 
cynical, honest Robert Walpole like his creations if he 
could come back to lead them again to-day? But, indeed, 
to repeat, he had no intention of creating them, they 
merely happened. Walpole's claim to fame in English 
history is of quite another sort. It so happens that this 
man, who is usually set down in the books as the most 
unscrupulous of public and a most sinful being in private, 
has in the main a purely moral appeal in the history 
of English politics. He taught Englishmen that it is 
possible to be a gentleman and a politician, to be an 
honest man and a wise ruler. He taught further that 
common sense in a statesman is of greater importance than 
philosophy, and that most of the rhetoric of politicians 
is empty wind. 

Walpole's story does more to expose the rottenness of 
political life than almost any other biography of his class. 
He is valuable in constitutional history not because he 
was a great politician but just because he was a very 
bad one. He has been credited with founding new 
theories of government. It would be truer to say that 
he went far towards making the governing class ridicu- 
lous. He was continually making the intriguers look 
contemptible. He had no moral pose about him. When 
he did protest against the stupidity and insincerity of the 
system, it was with the cynical touch of the man of the 
world who cannot lower himself to anger or revenge; 
he often got no further than a curl of the lips. Note the 
way he expressed himself in moments of pressure. Thus, 
when the Excise Bill tumult had reached its climax, 
he said, "This dance it will no further go." Dance ! He 



THE WALPOLES 109 

would not credit these clamouring political opponents 
with seriousness; it was at best a frivolous amusement 
to them; and, at the worst, mainly hypocrisy. For, in- 
deed, the political clamour against the Excise Bill is 
now admitted to have been shamefully insincere — just 
one way of turning rivals out of office. The people 
probably had more earnest objections to it; dreading 
lest it was another way of imposing Government inspec- 
tors over them. Now, alas, we have no such love of 
freedom — we accept an inquisitorial Insurance Act as a 
flock of sheep accepts a sheep-dog. The politicians knew 
perfectly well that these fears were almost baseless in 
the case of the Excise Bill; and they would not have 
objected to that result if it had followed it. Walpole 
may have been hasty in his contempt at times, but when 
he felt contemptuous he blurted it forth — which is at 
least a healthy indiscretion. He used a similar word to 
"dance" when Queen Caroline lay dying — we must for- 
give him if his nerves were overstrung. Someone had 
suggested that the Archbishop of Canterbury should be 
sent for to pray by her side. Walpole probably knew 
more of Caroline's faith than most people, and this is 
how he settled the urgent question for the courtiers. He 
turned to the Princess Emily: "Pray, madam, let this 
farce be played. The Archbishop will act it very well. 
It will do the Queen no hurt, no more than any good; 
and it will satisfy all the wise and good fools, who will 
call us all atheists if we don't pretend to be as great fools 
as they are." One cannot imagine a politician who 
"played the game" being so indiscreet in his language as 
that. Walpole may have been right or wrong in this 
case. The pursuit of politics was largely, and still is, a 



no MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

game of make-believe; and Walpole was one of the few 
men who had the pluck to be frank about it and not a 
theatrical dummy. It may seem a small thing as a matter 
of constitutional history; nevertheless, if it were carried 
into practice it would revolutionize politics as no rear- 
rangement of the Cabinet system could ever do. For 
then there would be three fairly distinct parties in the 
Houses — the dull people, the rogues, and the wise men. 
It would be easier to select candidates classified in this 
manner. The distinction between Whigs and Tories is 
mainly the theatrical manager's classification. 

A few generations of Walpole's frankness, and party 
politics would have died of shame. He has always been 
regarded as the greatest of the Whigs, and in so far that 
it meant support of the Hanoverians against the Stuarts, 
then such he was. But he discussed every question on its 
merits and as a matter of practicability. He threw over 
the very basis of the Whig foreign policy when he insisted 
on peace, and even alliance, with France. It may be 
argued that by his friendship with France he was over- 
throwing the longest tradition of English history. But 
this is only a superficial view. For the old mediaeval 
hostility to France had been mainly a barons' squabbling; 
and in Walpole's day it was at base the outcome of the 
intriguing mind of an imported Dutch King. William in- 
sisted on war with France because he was a Dutchman : 
Walpole was quite ready to make an alliance with France 
because he was a wise patriotic Englishman; he saw that 
an alliance would be more to our advantage than a war — 
especially when Louis XIV had been beaten. He refused, 
again, to be a sound Whig when it came to religious 
squabbles; and told the Nonconformists that the time 



THE WALPOLES in 

would never come when he would repeal the Tory High 
Church legislation, because, as we have seen, it would 
mean bitter national strife, and he did not consider the 
matter was worth the tumult. He threw over the Excise 
Bill when he found that meant strife also. Some critics 
say he was a coward and would have thrown overboard 
anything in the world so long as he could cling to office. 
In fact, he stayed in office because there was no one 
nearly so capable of doing the work. He remained 
Prime Minister so long as he had a majority in the 
House of Commons. When his rivals beat him at last 
with the cry "Down with corruption!" they won, not 
by proving the case against him, but by bribery ! The 
Prince of Wales confessed that in the two critical divi- 
sions in the Commons on the Westminster and Chippen- 
dale election appeals, he spent "in corruption, particularly 
among the Tories," the sum of £12,000. Walpole was 
beaten because he was too honest a man to bribe. Ship- 
pen, the leader of the Jacobites, led all his friends out 
of the House without voting, saying contemptuously that 
it was all a game of party politics, and he did not care 
which side won — which action, of course, drove the 
adventurer Bolingbroke wild with passion to see his petty 
party intrigues made ridiculous. 

But it is not fair to judge a Prime Minister by what 
he says or even by what he does. For the chief of a 
State, whether he be monarch or statesman, is usually 
the one man who can neither say nor do what he desires. 
Such men must be judged by more indirect methods. 
And the history of Horace Walpole, the son of the Chief 
Minister, will tell us more about the father than he could 
tell for himself. Even the outspoken Robert Walpole 



ii2 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

had his limitations, and nothing limits a man more than 
being a Prime Minister. It has somewhat the same effect 
on his character as putting a lark into a cage, or sending 
a healthy lion to walk up and down behind his bars at 
the Zoo. Even Robert probably only said and did half 
what he wanted. But his son was on a different footing; 
he could safely be a Walpole, without the general public 
spending its time looking through his windows or even 
throwing stones through them. 

To build a theory of Robert Walpole on the character 
of Horace will at once rouse the fundamental objection 
that even the parentage has been doubted — and by no 
means on entirely negligible ground; though, on the 
whole, the evidence is good enough that he was his legal 
father's son. Certainly, he was his spiritual son. He 
revered the great Minister, and continued to live in his 
house even when he was a grown man. He was Robert's 
staunch defender — and to undertake such a task needed 
no embusque in those times. Gathering all the evidence, 
we are justified in the conclusion that Horace was not 
far away from what Robert would have been if he had 
not been quite so robust and had not chanced to take up 
politics as a profession. Horace was Robert in mufti, 
living in retirement; merely thinking, when his father was 
forced to act; and thinking in private instead of speaking 
aloud his thoughts in public. The son supplied the theory 
of life which his father was so busy in carrying into prac- 
tice that he never had time to meditate on the rules. 
They both had much the same foundations, strange 
though it may seem on the first glance, for Robert was 
the craftsman and Horace was the philosopher. If we 
want to know what Robert thought, it is well worth tak- 



THE WALPOLES 113 

ing the trouble to discover what Horace said on the 
subject in the intimate privacy of his delicious letters. 

We have seen that the keynote of the Prime Minister's 
policy was his dislike of war and his clinging to peace at 
such a cost that half the nation was shrieking that the 
price of peace was our national honour. Robert Walpole 
never seems to have put his policy on any higher ground 
than the very mundane reason that war was expensive 
and not the best way of arriving at a satisfactory conclu- 
sion. But a few words from Horace put a whole phi- 
losophy of life behind what Sir Robert did in every day 
practice. Yet withal, there is that note of sane mate- 
rialist common sense that made his father adored by the 
City merchants, even when they only understood a frag- 
ment of what their political leader wanted. There is a 
letter of April 1777 which, were it written to The Times 
to-day, would probably bring down on the head of its 
writer enough Jingo oratory to float another "National- 
ist" party in Parliament. "I look," wrote Horace Wal- 
pole to Mann, "upon a great part of America as lost 
to this country. It is not less deplorable that such an 
inveteracy has been sown between the two countries as 
will probably outlast even the war. . . . What a differ- 
ence, in a future war with France or Spain, to have the 
Colonies in the opposite scale instead of being in ours. 
What politicians are those who have preferred the empty 
name of sovereignty to that of alliance, and forced sub- 
sidies to the golden ocean of commerce?" So far the 
case might have been grasped and approved by the most 
practical of the City gentlemen. But the scope of the 
argument is extended when Horace continues, and turns 
to the position in India : "We had acquired an Empire, 



ii 4 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

too, in whose plains the beggars we sent out as labourers 
could reap sacks of gold in three or four harvests; and 
who with their sickles and reaping-hooks have robbed 
and cut the throats of those who sowed the grain. 
[Could the writer have been thinking of Diamond Pitt?] 
These rapacious foragers have fallen together by the 
ears. ... I know nothing of the merits of the case on 
either side : I dare to say both are very blamable. I 
look only to the consequences, which I do not doubt will 
precipitate the loss of our acquisitions there; the title 
to which I never admired, and the possession of which 
I always regarded as a transitory vision. If we could 
keep it we should certainly plunder it, until the expense 
of maintaining would overbalance the returns; and though 
it has rendered a little more than the holy city of Jeru- 
salem, I look on such distant conquests as more destruc- 
tive than beneficial; and whether we are martyrs or 
banditti, whether we fight for the Holy Sepulchre or for 
lacs of rupees, I detest invasion of quiet kingdoms, both 
for their sakes and for our own; and it is happy for the 
former that the latter are never permanently benefited." 
The case against blatant Imperialism and vulgar Jin- 
goism has never been more precisely stated, both in calm 
sense and in passionate contempt. It was a most savage 
attack on the Pitt ideals, which the son of the great peace 
Minister had lived to see overthrow the policy of his 
father. It would be difficult to sum up more compactly 
the difference between the Walpole ideals and those of 
the Pitts. When we find Horace with such ideas so 
continually behind all that he wrote, it is not an unfair 
suggestion that such was his heritage from the family 
tradition; for his philosophy fits so accurately into the 



THE WALPOLES 115 

fretwork of Sir Robert's practice. Horace is what his 
father would have been if the latter had been strong 
enough to keep out of politics. Horace is the Norfolk 
squire come to London Town as a gentleman; whereas 
his father had travelled thither as a member of Parlia- 
ment. 

But hear Horace Walpole still further on the question 
of militarism. On September 12, 178 1, he wrote : "This 
is war ! One sits at home coolly hoping that five or six 
vessels full of many hundreds of men are gone to the 
bottom of the deep ! Can one look back on the last six 
years and not shudder at the devastation deliberate love 
of power has committed — to the utter loss of power 1 
. . . We are dreaming of recovering America ; we might 
as sensibly pursue our claim to the crown of France." 
It was the answer of Robert Walpole's son to the con- 
tinual braying of the Pitts' trumpets of British Imperial- 
ism. One feels that the delicately minded Horace was 
bored to desperation by the vulgarity of the new creed, 
and indignant with the stupidity of it. Being a man of 
intellect — and not a mere sentimentalist like Chatham 
or an unhealthy recluse like Pitt the Younger — Horace 
knew who it was who won the prizes of this policy of 
conquest and who it was who suffered the losses. Many 
years before, in 1759, when he heard of the capture of 
Quebec, he had written: "The generals on both sides 
slain, and on both sides the seconds in command 
wounded; in short, very near what battle should be, in 
which only the principals ought to suffer." That was 
throwing down the glove to the fantastic Pitt boast 
that they were winning wealth for the whole British 
nation. Horace Walpole, who had the family distaste 



n6 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

for inflated rhetoric, thus expressed his opinion that the 
people of England were dancing to suit the convenience 
of the men on top who called the tune; and he was 
delighted when the top-dogs paid the price of their own 
adventures. 

With all their experience of political life these Wal- 
poles never ceased wondering how their contemporaries 
could be so forgetful of personal honour. This is what 
Horace said in 178 1, when one would have imagined 
that he was old enough to be a little cynical of lapses of 
consistency in public affairs; he was writing of the Ameri- 
can War: "I do look on Lord Cornwallis as a renegade. 
He was one of the five who protested against the Stamp 
Act. He therefore had no principles then, or has none 
now, and neither in complaisance with the vulgar or the 
powerful, will I say I approve him. When a gentleman, 
a man of quality, sells himself for the paltry honours 
and profits he must quit so soon, and leave nothing but 
a tarnished name behind him, he has my utter contempt." 
Then Horace continued with one of the shortest declara- 
tions of human rights: "I prefer the liberation of man- 
kind to any local circumstances. Were I young and of 
heroic texture I would go to America; as I am decrepit 
and have the bones of a sparrow, I must die on my 
perch; and when you [he is writing to the Countess of 
Upper Ossory] turn courtier, I will peck my bread and 
water out of another hand." Which, take it all in all, is 
perhaps as defiant a claim for human freedom as ever 
was written — and daintily put, withal. 

Very few people have dared to challenge Horace 
Walpole's historical accuracy. He wrote so many letters 
that those preserved and published fill seventeen volumes. 



THE WALPOLES 117 

Then, there are six more fat volumes of the history of 
the reigns of George II and George III, besides his 
Reminiscences. His work on art and his fiction and 
belles lettres need not concern us here, except as a re- 
minder that this second generation of Walpoles had 
wearied of the trickeries of political life and retired into 
more dignified pursuits. They were intended for a quiet 
honest life; and the noise and bustle of the Pitts and their 
friends were for less sensitive minds and nerves than 
Horace Walpole's. He carried on his father's memo- 
ries, so quite naturally he could not succeed in the new 
politics; just as an honest little shopkeeper goes down 
before the avalanche of the advertiser bred in the finan- 
cial slums of New York. The Walpoles were the last 
of an older and more civilized world. The Pitts were 
the tub-thumpers of the new generation, where noise was 
to have more weight than reason and statesmanship was 
to give way to the politicians. The Pitt policy was burst- 
ing into full bloom by 1761, and this is how Horace 
Walpole describes the election of that year : it "now 
engrosses all conversation and all purses; for the expense 
is incredible. West Indians, conquerors, nabobs, and 
admirals, attack every borough. . . . Corruption now 
stands upon its own legs — no money is issued from the 
Treasury; there are no parties, no pretence of grievances, 
and yet venality is grosser than ever. The borough of 
Sudbury has gone as far as to advertise for a chapman ! 
We have been as victorious as the Roman and are as 
corrupt. I don't know how soon the Praetorian militia 
will set the Empire to sale." Then follows a quaint little 
anecdote which will interest those who concern them- 
selves with the manner in which our present ruling fam- 



u8 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

ilies founded their fortunes. "Sir Nathaniel Curzon has 
struck a very novel stroke, advertising that the King 
intended to make him a peer, and therefore recommend- 
ing his brother to the county of Derby for the same 
independent principles with himself. He takes a peerage 
to prove his independence, and recommends his brother 
to the Opposition to prove his gratitude." 

It is not possible to understand Sir Robert Walpole, 
the Prime Minister, until one has understood his son, the 
letter writer. They are part of the same picture, and 
one must see the whole of it. And charming Horace 
himself will be more understandable when set beside the 
son whom Chatham left behind. John Pitt, the second 
earl, was a nuisance to his friends and a danger to his 
country. Being a more insignificant man than his father, 
he carried the latter's pompous manners still further: 
it was said that they "forbid approach and prohibit all 
familiarity." In short, he was something very near being 
a starched fool. Even his own brother had to remove 
him from the Admiralty; whereupon Chatham began to 
imagine that he had military qualities. His conceit grew 
so big that he said he ought to have been sent to the 
Peninsular War instead of Wellington; so to comfort 
him they allowed him to command in the Walcheren 
expedition; with the result that he made it one of the 
laughing-stocks of English history. 

Great Chatham, with his sabre drawn, 
Stood waiting for Sir Richard Strachan; 
Sir Richard, longing to be at 'em, 
Stood waiting for the Earl of Chatham. 



THE WALPOLES 119 

It was the last great deed the Pitts performed for Eng- 
land. It is not an exaggeration — as the hastily misin- 
formed will think — to say that it was fairly typical of 
their family traditions. It is impossible to imagine a 
Walpole in such a predicament. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE PITT FAMILY: AND ITS MYTHS 

IT was hastily assumed, because Charles Darwin wrote 
up the subject of Evolution and somebody else in- 
vented a motor-bicycle, that the age of myths had 
long ago passed. It was understood that we now con- 
sider only facts — and that romantic fancies are left to 
the children and the poets. Whereas, on the contrary, 
the last hundred years have seen the birth of stranger 
mythical creations than ever soothed the mind of an 
inquisitive Greek. We have written for ourselves a 
history that is packed with the wildest legends, the most 
impossible tales of statesmen — a history that is full of 
freaks of fancy and not creatures of fact. And the 
wildest of the wild romances of modern history is the 
great myth of the Pitts. Never did a calculating priest- 
hood play such tricks with its congregations as when the 
historians of England dressed the Pitts in the robes of 
patriots and decorated them with the symbols of states- 
manship. The legend of the Pitts is one of those amaz- 
ing superstitions that have coiled round the mind of man. 
There were so many advantages in the Greek myths. 
They were generally beautiful; and, somewhat unex- 
pectedly perhaps, they are now being discovered to be 
true. The excavations in Crete have turned the Mino- 
taur from a romance into a history; the tales of the early 
Greek races are being read as the latest word of ethno- 
logical science. But the English modern myths could 



THE PITT FAMILY 121 

never be claimed as beautiful, and they are turning out 
to be untrue. Indeed, they are superstitions rather than 
myths; for the myth is usually a true story which uni- 
versity gentlemen are too nervous to believe. But to 
come to the Pitts. Ninety-nine Englishmen in every 
hundred, if asked to describe them in a few words, would 
declare that they were the fullest expression of that virile 
energy which has made England supreme; that they 
were the finest type of business-like patriotism and British 
common sense. Such is the Pitt Myth. The Pitts in 
real life were as like this fancy picture as a cabbage is 
like an oak or a tadpole like a lion. A cabbage has 
roots like an oak, and the tadpole has a tail like a 
lion. But Nelson could never have won Trafalgar in 
ships built of cabbages, while a tadpole has no right to 
the title of king of the beasts. The two famous Pitts, 
far from being efficient patriots, were, in the main, only 
very successful sentimentalists. But it is not fair to the 
English people to tell them the whole truth about the 
Pitts in a few callous sentences. The worst must be 
broken more gently by a calm statement of the main 
events of their lives; free from the exaggeration of the 
somewhat emotional persons who have written so much 
of history. The university don, being rather old-maidish 
in his habits, often shares with his aunts a certain preju- 
diced outlook on life which leads him into false judg- 
ments. The orthodox historians have spent much of 
their time in misjudging the Pitts out of all human 
recognition. It will require a great effort of calmer judg- 
ment to restore the truth ; to suggest a plan for exhuming 
these two buried Englishmen, and replacing the fantastic 
images that have been raised above their tombs. They 



122 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

will not necessarily be pleasant images, but they will at 
least in some way resemble the dead. 

The two great Pitts cannot be understood alone. They 
must be taken with the whole Pitt family of which they 
were so perfect an expression. The two Williams ful- 
filled the destiny of the family tradition, the ideals of 
that very rough Diamond Pitt who founded the family 
fortunes in India by breaking as many of the moral and 
criminal laws as he found in his path. His chief aim in 
life would appear to have been the building of a great 
fortune. To that end he found it necessary to assist in 
the building of the British Empire. It would be hard 
to express more precisely the intentions of the first Lord 
Chatham — though to him, being less practical than his 
cleverer grandfather, a fortune was represented by the 
robes and trappings of a peerage and high offices, rather 
than by a big banking account. Both the Williams lost 
no opportunity of refusing money, with a blast of trum- 
pets which is more generally associated with the seizure 
of spoils rather than their surrender; though in the long 
run they both somehow managed to accept quite con- 
venient pensions and perquisites at the public expense. 
They knew to a nicety just how far honesty is the best 
policy — and the man who measures that is often some- 
thing of a knave. 

But the Pitts must be taken in chronological detail. 
It is the sad story of a family that went from bad to 
worse; that started by stealing diamonds in India, and 
finished, in the younger Pitt, by almost stealing the honour 
and safety of the British people by conducting the war 
against the French with the irresponsible thoughtlessness 
of a second lieutenant. Until they got into bad company 



THE PITT FAMILY 123 

in India and in London, and became financiers and poli- 
ticians, the Pitts seem to have been a reasonably honest 
family in quiet Dorset. They emerged from a probably 
still more honest obscurity (for fame is so often the 
first-fruits of something shady) in the time of Henry 
VIII, when Nicholas Pitt was a modest landowner. His 
greatgrandson appears to have been less strict in his 
life, for he became Sir William of Strathfieldsaye; and it 
was not long before his branch of the family got so 
intermingled in official posts and political intrigues that 
George Pitt (1 722-1 803), a contemporary of the two 
great Williams, found himself (without any reasonable 
excuse to explain the position), as Baron Rivers, in the 
House of Lords. He had been abroad as ambassador, 
and became Lord Lieutenant of various counties at home; 
then rose to be a Lord of the Bedchamber; and when 
he died Flaxman worked a mural tablet for his tomb. 
He was a real Pitt, and an example of how perfectly 
they represented the ruling class of their century. He 
was very handsome; though Horace Walpole candidly 
described him as "brutal and half mad"; while his wife 
was "all loveliness within and without." His brother 
became a knight and a general, and married the daughter 
of a viscount; and did all the things then considered 
correct form in the governing set. He took himself 
seriously in a way, being a Pitt; and his "Letters to a 
Young Nobleman upon Various Subjects, particularly 
on Government and Civil Liberty . . . with Some 
Thoughts on the English Constitution and the Heads of 
a Plan of a Parliamentary Reform," in its gorgeous title 
simply reeks of the family sentiments. 

He is so illuminating on the Pitt tradition that it is 



i2 4 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

hard to tear oneself away to the other branch of Lord 
Rivers' kinsmen, Thomas Pitt, the grandfather of the first 
great William, and the real jewel of the family in more 
senses than one. Thomas's father was the rector of 
Blandford; and his uncle, William Pitt, was the mayor 
of Dorchester. Thomas had restless ambitions and went 
to sea in a merchantman. When he arrived in India he 
refused to return with his ship, as bound by his contract, 
and settled down with the persistent intention of making 
a fortune. The established East India Company tried 
to turn him out as an interloper and infringer of its 
charter; but as Thomas Pitt was not the kind of man 
who could be turned out, it eventually came to terms of 
a sort, and allowed him to trade on his own account, 
and even undertake commissions for the Company. But 
he was soon accused of falsifying the invoices in his own 
favour and was dismissed in 1681. The Company, after 
eight years' experience of him, could only issue the 
despairing appeal: "Secure his person whatever it cost 
the government, he being a desperate fellow and one 
that we fear will not stick at doing any mischief that lies 
in his power." Indeed, he was so unscrupulous a person 
that the Company a few years later thought he was just 
the man it wanted as Governor of Madras; but that was 
not until 1695, and Thomas had founded several typical 
Pitt traditions before then. After being turned out of 
India in 1681 he began intriguing with the politicians to 
get a charter for a new rival India Company. Since 
Charles II was in favour of the Old Company, backed 
by Sir Josiah Child, a Stuart man, Pitt therefore became 
a Whig man. He had no philosophical reasons, after 



THE PITT FAMILY 125 

the manner of Locke or Hobbes: he was a merchant, not 
a philosopher. 

Politics to Thomas Pitt was merely a way of making 
money by manipulating trade. It was the very heart's 
core of the political theory of the eighteenth century. He 
wanted to found a New East India Company which would 
be his own, and so push out of the way the Old Com- 
pany which belonged to his rivals. Thomas Pitt was 
one of the first men who made Imperialism into a prac- 
tical business. He saw that the House of Commons was 
the place for the company promoters who were playing 
for big stakes. An office in the City was good enough 
for the smaller men; but the big minds who coveted big 
purses must go to Westminster. So Pitt went into Parlia- 
ment and became a Whig. Most of the adventurers be- 
came Whigs, because it was essentially the creed of the 
new men who wanted to turn out the old — whether poli- 
ticians, Government officials, or the established traders. 
The Stuarts had never had much consideration or liking 
for the merchants : for the Stuarts, to give them their due, 
never became modern enough to regard government as 
a trade by which one could make money more easily than 
by keeping a shop. To the politicians and the governing 
set of the Georgian age this was the whole essence of the 
game. The British Empire became a great trading 
company; strictly limited to the shareholders so far as 
the dividends went, while the national purse and the na- 
tional blood paid all the losses and found the necessary 
capital. For the company promoter it was an ideal State, 
and Thomas Pitt was one of the happiest of the idealists. 
He put his money into one of the greatest financial adven- 



i 2 6 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

tures that the bankers and merchants have ever floated. 
He became an Imperialist, a politician and a Whig: he 
founded the Pitt family and the Pitt tradition. 

In those days, in order to become really respectable it 
was imperative to be a landlord. So Thomas Pitt began 
to invest the spoils of India in English manors. An 
estate near Salisbury had gained the necessary influence 
to return him to the Convention Parliament of 1689 as 
the member for that cathedral town. It was symbolic 
of the new politics. The mediaeval Church had given 
place to merchant adventurers. Pitt voted that the Stu- 
arts who had opposed his New India Company should 
be turned out of office, and that he and his friends — 
and incidentally a man from Holland named William 
of Orange, with an English wife — should be put in the 
place of the old Government; and, still more important, 
in the place of the Old Company. Everything happened 
as he intended. When, in 1691, the New Company 
calmly started operations, no one had the power to sup- 
press it. Of course, the old men had not entirely gone, 
and there was opposition; Pitt was even refused a pass- 
port for India, and summoned before the King and 
Council. But he merely shook himself when he came out, 
and it all rolled off, like water off a duck's back. When 
they said no passport for India, he said he was only 
going to Madeira — and started for India at once. Be- 
fore he left, he had made his position at Westminster 
quite secure by buying the parliamentary seat of Old 
Sarum, which was ready for his use when he returned to 
England in 1695. 

The career of this great founder of patriotism and 
British Imperialism went gaily on. Already, in 1678, he 



THE PITT FAMILY 127 

had linked himself to the royal family of the land which 
he and his descendants were so soon to rule by marrying 
the granddaughter of James V. But inasmuch as his 
rule of the Empire was to be of an unconstitutional kind, 
and not recognized by public statutes, so perhaps it is 
significant that the granddaughter should be merely of 
the illegitimate royal line. Nevertheless, the marriage 
was altogether typical of the Pitt adventurers in their 
less pompous days: had William Pitt the Younger pos- 
sessed a son he might have asked the hand of an author- 
ized and hall-marked princess. Thomas got to know his 
wife through his ardent friendship with a man whom 
he met in India — Vincent, "a notorious swindler who was 
afterwards convicted of serious crime and fled to England 
with Thomas." Mrs. Pitt was the niece of this attractive 
creature. 

The Company after many years of struggle could stand 
out no longer against the daring deeds of this magnificent 
penny-dreadful hero; though there must have seemed a 
lingering hope of escaping from his intrigues when Pitt 
started in 1692 the new game of fitting out a privateer 
ship to raid the French. But it was not to be, however 
much the schoolboys of England will regret this lost chap- 
ter when the lives of the Pitts are issued (as surely they 
will one day be) in penny form with the usual attractive 
cover. So, as already said, the Company in despair made 
Thomas President of Fort St. George, or Governor of 
Madras. And a splendid servant he made: "he always 
saw what to do, and did it." If he had possessed any 
sense of what was honest and honourable he would have 
been quite a splendid fellow — but then he would not have 
founded the British Empire; neither would he have made 



i 2 8 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

himself a fortune which enabled his grandchildren to 
become the rulers of England; for, without that fortunate 
backing, in a world where position went by merits and 
only rarely by favour, it is quite probable that the two 
great Pitts would never have been recorded in history. 
However, that is anticipating. Thomas Pitt, in all prac- 
tical senses of the term, was a far better man than either 
of them. He was efficient; he could do his job — which 
was to make the Company pay and prosper. Of course, 
being a Pitt, he put on rather pompous airs and lived in 
great style in India; but then the Oriental imagination, 
being more cultured than the imagination of the drab 
West, likes style and pomp. But Thomas Pitt never 
forgot that he was a merchant; whereas his grandson, 
Chatham, could scarcely ever remember that he was a 
statesman, so continually did he appear to think that he 
was something much nearer the actor-manager. 

Perhaps it would be more precise to say that Thomas 
never forgot that his chief business was to make money; 
and if it could be for himself instead of for the Company, 
that was by no means a serious fault in his eyes. In 1701 
he began his greatest adventure. One day an English 
skipper stole a diamond from a slave and sold it to a 
native merchant, who in turn carried it to Pitt, who 
often bought such gems when Governor, for they were a 
convenient way of remitting official moneys when banks 
were not so common as they are now. But this diamond 
was good enough to keep for himself; indeed, he paid 
the merchant a sum of over £20,000 for it. It was not 
until 17 17 (after an alluring series of adventures, more 
suitable for the truth of romance than the solemn unre- 
alities of the history-books) that at last Thomas sold his 



THE PITT FAMILY 129 

treasure to the Regent of France. They say he got 
£135,000 for it. With the proceeds of this stolen gem 
the Pitts established themselves in English public life as 
our rulers: they were henceforth in a position to dictate 
their terms to the less fortunate people who had no luck. 
Of course Thomas proved before the Council of Madras 
that he had not stolen it; and in the eyes of the police 
constable he was perhaps innocent; but in that world 
where they composed "Moral Essays," as Pope did, they 
wrote somewhat biting lines on the event. Not only the 
moralists who write verse had their moments of cynical 
hesitation; for it appears that when in 1709 the Company 
had another quarrel with its masterful servant, a charge 
of illicit diamond-buying was one of the accusations under 
which he was packed off to Europe; and it is just a little 
suspicious that Pitt landed in Sweden instead of England, 
and stayed there almost a year — as though he thought he 
might be safer for a time to be beyond reach of the law. 
It is one of the chief difficulties of the governing class to 
dodge those embarrassing laws which they are compelled 
to make for the restraint of the common people who live 
in the world beneath. 

Back in England in 17 10, Thomas Pitt began to count 
the spoils he had reaped in India. Then he translated 
them, as occasion permitted, into those English manors 
which were to make the Pitts one of the ruling families 
of their race. When they were all bought they made a 
picturesque list, and one feels that they should go into 
the lilt of verse rather than cold prose. They were the 
estates of Bosconnoe, Bradock, Brannell and Treskil- 
lard in Cornwall; Woodyates and Stratford-under-the- 
Castle in Wiltshire; Abbots Ann in Hampshire; Swallow- 



130 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

field in Berkshire; with Blandford St. Mary and Kyn- 
aston in Dorset. They should be set together, after the 
manner of "Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all"; and, when 
the memory of the British Empire is not so sweet in the 
nostrils of patriotic Englishmen as it may be to-day, 
perhaps, who knows, the names of the Pitt manors may 
be passed down in tradition as an awful warning of how 
an Empire was built on blood and labour, in order that 
some few men might make themselves lords by the spoils. 

For that is the sober truth: and these Pitt manors 
are the root of half the folly of the eighteenth and nine- 
teenth centuries. Of course there would.have come other 
men to take their place if the two Pitts had not arrived on 
the stage. But surely nobody else could have been quite 
such effective actor-managers of the alluring melodrama 
which caught the fancy of the English crowd. They were 
indeed born for the part they played. They received 
from old Thomas those priceless heirlooms for such 
players in such a play; he left them outward pomp and 
style, personal ambition, an unscrupulousness which had 
made Thomas's fortune in trade and was to make his 
grandchildren's fortune in political intrigue; a most use- 
ful knack of writing and speaking piously, which gave so 
many more opportunities of acting impiously; a host of 
family connections which had dug their roots deep into 
English social life. All these things descended to the two 
great Pitts as their heritage from Thomas. 

Consider for a moment the social factors of this in- 
heritance. Robert, his eldest son, married Harriet Vil- 
liers, the sister of the Earl of Grandison, and their son 
was William, first Earl of Chatham. Thomas, the sec- 
ond son, married the daughter of the last Earl of Lon- 



THE PITT FAMILY 131 

donderry, and came in for the surviving scraps of that 
house as the first earl of a new line. His history shows 
all the symptoms of his having been a thorough scoun- 
drel. John, the third son, seems to have been duller or 
honester than his brothers, for he escaped a title him- 
self, but married the daughter of Viscount Fauconberg; 
but Lucy, his sister, married General Stanhope, who nat- 
urally showed the respect due to her family by becoming 
an Earl. Her sister, Essex, married a Cholmondeley, and 
her grandson became Lord Delamere. Of Robert Pitt's 
children, besides William of Chatham, Thomas married 
a daughter of the house of Lyttleton, and played his cards 
so well that his son (that is, Chatham's nephew) became 
Baron Camelford of Bosconnoe. This first Camelford 
was a true son of the Pitts, seeing that he was a flowery 
orator and "the prince of all the male beauties." As the 
member for Old Sarum he had the delicate task of mak- 
ing, in 1782, a speech against parliamentary reform, 
which he is said to have accomplished "without a false 
step" ! But to his credit be it recorded that next year 
he was on the other side, and even offered to sacrifice his 
family borough for the national cause. Which shows 
that he was either reverting from the Pitt type or perhaps 
merely posing — which was also entirely after their 
manner. When we come to the powerful connections 
that William of Chatham made by his marriage, and 
recollect that the elder branch of the Pitts of Strath- 
fieldsaye were also engaged successfully in their race to 
the peerage (which George Pitt reached as Baron Rivers 
in 1776), we shall then understand that the breed of 
Thomas the Diamond King had wormed themselves 
firmly into the solid oak of British society. It so hap- 



132 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

pened that the two Williams succeeded to very little of 
old Thomas's material wealth: but he left them a net- 
work of powerful relations, and a family tradition which 
began as the business of trading in India and finished 
(after the two Williams had splattered it with rhetoric) 
as the Imperial tradition of the British Empire. 

It is so easy to understand how this theory of the 
British Empire became the gospel tidings that the Pitts 
brought to the people of England. It was clear, after 
their example, that there was no better trade for am- 
bitious youths than sailing on merchant adventures be- 
yond the seas. Thomas had gripped the secret of money- 
making; he had turned Dick Whittington and his cat from 
an almost forgotten romance to a fresh reality which 
was not sober fact but very golden indeed. We might 
almost call Thomas Pitt the first great merchant prince 
of modern England — with due apologies to Dick afore- 
said and Sir John Philpot; to the Poles, who even became 
dukes, and Sir Thomas Gresham : who all were pioneers 
of English commerce. But Pitt stands out from them 
in that the time was now ripe for the greatest merchant 
prince to assert his right to make his grandchildren 
Prime Ministers of their country — Ministers who would 
put into theoretical form what their grandparent had 
merely practised in everyday life. Thomas had gone 
into Parliament, as we have noted, and had quite delib- 
erately used his power to further his private affairs. It 
all seemed quite frank. He had bought the most notori- 
ously corrupt borough in England — Old Sarum — surely 
a sufficiently obvious symbol of his intentions and utili- 
tarian morals. 

It was the colossal nature of his success that caused 



THE PITT FAMILY 133 

a change in the family tactics. Thomas had become so 
rich that his sons and grandsons were no longer merchant 
adventurers but county families: their relatives were no 
longer merely in the manors and the City, but in the peer- 
age. Now, if there was one thing the Pitts thoroughly 
valued it was the worldly advantages of pomp and pride. 
To become quite vulgarly colloquial for a moment, one 
would whisper the word "swank" to denote a very im- 
portant part of the Pitt inheritance. So when they be- 
came county families they knew how to live up to the 
part. As they were no longer traders they had to find 
another outlet for the ambition and self-seeking of their 
race. And what more natural than that they should take 
to the gentleman's trade of getting a Government post 
and ruling their inferiors? Their far-seeing ancestor had 
provided them with parliamentary seats, of so corrupt a 
nature that public opinion could scarcely reach the biggest 
fool or the blackest knave who held them. It was obvi- 
ous that the Pitt boys must go into Parliament, and rule 
England for their own good as their grandfather had 
ruled India for his. There was no change of principle; 
it was only a change of circumstances. Every quality 
which Thomas had found so useful in his Indian adven- 
tures was now to make the William Pitts a still bigger 
success in London. 

Thomas Pitt had not worried his fellow-citizens with 
many public ideals; it was sufficient for him that he 
could make a fortune behind the bulwark of the English 
national reputation, without building on that fact a 
gigantic political theory of the British Empire and its 
place in the world. This theory was the life-work of the 
two Williams. They preached to their countrymen the 



i 3 4 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

somewhat fantastic doctrine that if all England could do 
what their grandfather had done in India, then English- 
men would become the richest race in the world, and 
England would become the greatest of all the nations. 
The doctrine certainly seemed most plausible — for 
Thomas Pitt had been very rich and very powerful; and if 
the multiplication-table system were applied to him there 
was really no saying how big the result might be. This, 
indeed, was the very centre of the Pitt doctrine of the 
British Empire. It might have been issued as a pam- 
phlet: "Hints to a Young Nation: How to Get Rich 
Quickly. By Those who have Succeeded." One can 
imagine the whole idea being developed to-day by a smart 
set of American advertisers. They would turn the Brit- 
ish Empire into a company on the latest principles of 
centralized management; the Board of Education would 
become a sort of commercial college for training its 
clerks and typists; while the diplomats would become its 
commercial travellers. One does not mean to say that 
such a Foreign Office, for example, would be any more 
harmful than the gentlemen we keep there to-day. Even 
a lot of commercial travellers would have possessed 
enough wit to warn us that the greatest European War 
was coming rather more than five minutes before it 
started. But that by the way. 

The main point to emphasize is that the Pitts' political 
theory of a British Empire — the foundation of which is 
their main fame in English history — was nothing but 
their grandfather's experience as an Indian trader trans- 
lated into the more select language that is considered 
good form in parliamentary circles. It was making the 
Pitt method the model for the national method. It was 



THE PITT FAMILY 135 

turning a merchant's office into a national council cham- 
ber. Not having much original brain-power, and being 
both educated in the narrowest of schools, it was perhaps 
only natural that the two Pitt Ministers should hastily 
conclude that a system which had made the fortunes of 
their family must necessarily make the fortune of the 
English nation. If Thomas had been able to get pos- 
session of stolen diamonds sneaked from slaves, why 
should not Englishmen as a race start laying their hands 
on everything within reach? It paid the Pitts a thousand- 
fold. Why should it not pay England? 

Being men of inferior mental calibre, they were never 
able to analyse the economic position. They really 
thought that it had added to the wealth of England 
when grandfather Pitt had been able to buy so many 
manors. Being exceedingly childlike in their thoughts — 
however roguish their actions and speeches may seem at 
times — being so childlike, they probably failed to realize 
that the aforesaid manors had been there before Thomas 
bought them; he had not added them to the wealth of 
England; and the rest of Englishmen were not any the 
wealthier because Thomas collected their rents. As for 
the diamond, the French got that, for what it was worth ; 
and, on the capital Pitt acquired by its sale, Englishmen 
had to pay interest by their labours on the Pitt estates 
and on the Pitt investments. But the Pitts knew little 
of the principles of political economy — an ignorance they 
share with most politicians to-day. They did not think 
out these facts in detail. They merely became obsessed 
with a rhetorical faith that the Pitt system was good for 
everybody everywhere. The world in their emotional 
brains became a great diamond mine and spice field, 



136 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

where the prizes would fall to the men and nations that 
were most ruthless and energetic, as their grandfather 
had been in India. He had cared little for law or other 
people's convenience : and the Pitts believed England 
could be great if it cared as little for other nations as 
he had cared for his trading rivals. 

We shall not find much in the career of the two 
Williams which is not clearer in the life of Thomas; 
partly because he was a cleverer man than either of the 
other two; partly because he can be judged by his deeds. 
Whereas, so much about the two Williams is rhetoric. 
It is quite a simple thing to judge one of Robert Wal- 
pole's frank speeches: we may not agree with it, but at 
least we can treat it as something solid. It is not like 
handling butter on a hot day in July; it does not leave 
us with the sensation of having the handle of the spoon 
covered with the treacle — which is one's mental condition 
after examining a speech by the Pitts, in which there is 
usually more style than matter. 

Perhaps there was a good reason for rhetoric taking 
the place of facts. What the Pitts had to do was to 
persuade the people of England that it was to their advan- 
tage to raise armies, and incidentally be killed in them, 
in order that they might win territories which would give 
fat posts to the county gentlemen's sons and fat dividends 
to the City merchants when they developed them for 
trade. Stated so baldly, it is clear that it would not have 
been a popular cry. It might have been good enough to 
win votes in the Houses of Parliament, because the mem- 
bers were chosen by a very little group of the nation — 
although the Hanoverian Houses were a good deal more 
independent than the Commons of this present century. 



THE PITT FAMILY 137 

Even Pitt could not blurt out the whole truth; he had 
to wrap it up in pretty colours. We may even admit that 
he probably did not know he was talking weak logic and 
bad economics; for, it is again necessary to insist, both 
the Pitts were badly educated men. They were therefore 
in the happy position of being able to talk rubbish with- 
out knowing it, just as a child can swallow powders in 
jam. They probably convinced themselves by their own 
rhetoric, for they were the very embodiments of self- 
satisfaction. 

The position of the Pitts will be seen to have been 
exceedingly precarious, if we consider it for a moment. 
The whole gist of their political gospel was the growth 
and prosperity of the British Empire as a trading con- 
cern. Of course, the Earl of Chatham, being a very fine 
gentleman who liked to imagine that he had all the attri- 
butes of a Roman senator (being insufficiently educated he 
did not know what exceedingly shady persons most of the 
senators of Rome were), could not crudely talk of trade. 
So his pet hobby was spinning flowing periods about Lib- 
erty and the other abstract virtues — at least, they have 
generally remained abstract in political circles. Chatham 
was one of those heroic persons who disdain to count the 
cost — to others. When Clive's father came to tell the 
great War Minister how his son knew a place in India 
where a treasure was hid, a treasure that would pay 
off the National Debt, Pitt said fifty millions would be 
sufficient. "Lord, sir," said the old man, "consider, if 
your administration lasts, the National Debt will soon 
be two hundred millions." It was a dainty stroke against 
this reckless gambler who could not keep count of his 
losses. But perhaps that was why he was adored by the 



138 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

City bankers: he gave them such a splendid scope for 
investment in gilt-edged national debts. Nevertheless, 
the very core of the Pitts' gospel for England was eco- 
nomic and financial. Now, if we turn to that profoundly 
impartial book the Dictionary of National Biography 
(which is a foretaste of the Judgment Book itself, for the 
solemnity and justice of its verdicts), it is a little alarm- 
ing to be told: "Chatham knew nothing of financial or 
commercial matters. He never applied himself steadily 
to any branch of knowledge, and was not even familiar 
with the rules of the House of Commons. He appears 
to have confined his reading to a small number of books, 
and according to his sister, 'knew nothing accurately 
except Spenser's Fairy Queen/ " It is startling to be told 
that the British Empire was nursed through its long- 
clothes period by a gentleman whose main qualification 
was an accurate knowledge of the Fairy Queen. The 
impossibility of the whole matter arouses one's deepest 
suspicions — makes one suspect that things were not what 
they seemed. It is clear that the Fairy Queen is not a 
complete clue to the influence of the Pitts; we must search 
elsewhere. 

The Pitt myth has it that the father and son were a 
couple of high-souled patriots who inspired England by 
the purity of their devotion and saved her by the match- 
less perfection of their intellects. If this statement con- 
tains any truth, it is in the proportions of one needle to 
the haystack — indeed, it is scarcely worth searching for 
it. In sober fact, Chatham's largest asset was a consum- 
mate power of acting — he could play so perfectly that 
it is his kindest and safest defence to say that he gen- 
erally deceived himself. As for his son, it is more diffi- 



THE PITT FAMILY 139 

cult to say what was his greatest quality — unless it be 
that he was sufficiently great to conceal how small he was. 
His conduct of the Revolutionary Wars, as we shall see, 
was one long tale of muddle-headed mismanagement. It 
is possible that one of these days, instead of continuing 
to accept what the orthodox historians have said about 
the mythical Pitts, the student will consider a few facts in 
their careers and dismiss some of the fancies. When the 
fancies are gone the Pitts will not seem nearly such 
attractive figures. 

William Pitt the Elder only got £200 a year out of 
the family fortunes, and he was compelled to live on his 
wits. They would not have carried him to any great 
fortune, but his old school-friends at Eton, the Grenvilles 
and the Lyttletons, soon turned out to be as accomplished 
a gang of office-hunters and political intriguers as the 
rather innocent Pitt could desire. They were the young 
gentlemen-on-the-make who were to be the accomplices 
of the City merchants in this great scheme of a British 
Empire which was to provide posts for the one and 
dividends for the other. They were not even the young 
gentlemen who did the fighting: they stayed safely at 
home and took the profits; for example, they controlled 
the Admiralty instead of fighting in the ships. In short, 
they were accomplished politicians of the smaller kind. 
They supported their convictions or repudiated them 
exactly as they found it convenient at the moment. They 
have not been accused of any great political crimes; 
they were rather amiable cynics and men of the world, 
that is, they got as much of it for themselves as they 
could. They were just the men to run a British Empire. 

The Grenvilles persuaded their uncle, Lord Cobham, 



i 4 o MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

to give their friend William a cornetcy in the Blues — this 
was his first modest share in the British Empire. Then 
he entered Parliament for the family seat at Old Sarum. 
He had already tried to get himself into the public view 
by writing a "Letter on Superstition, addressed to the 
People of England." Note that Pitt had begun to lecture 
the people as if he were already Prime Minister and 
Archbishop in one; which was so like a Pitt. Walpole 
soon measured this group of political adventurers at their 
true value, and christened them the "Boy Patriots" or 
the "Cobham cousinhood." Later on he flung in their 
teeth exactly how he despised them: "A patriot, sir! 
Why, patriots spring up like mushrooms. I could raise 
fifty of them within the four-and-twenty hours. I have 
raised many of them in one night. It is but refusing to 
gratify an unreasonable or insolent demand, and up starts 
a patriot. There is not a man amongst them whose par- 
ticular aim I am not able to ascertain, and from what 
motives they have entered into the lists of opposition." 
We must not think they were unreasonable men. In 
Pitt's case there were exactly ten thousand reasons why 
he should attack Walpole with the noisy yapping of a cur 
attacking a St. Bernard. For Sarah, Duchess of Marl- 
borough, had promised him in her will that number of 
golden sovereigns, and the chance of a huge reversionary 
estate, if he would help her petty spite against the great 
Minister. The servile Pitt — for servile he was, for all 
his Roman-senator posturing — changed his tone very 
quickly after the Duchess was dead and the money safe 
in his keeping. Contemporaries were under no delusions 
as to Pitt; he was to them a real person, not a myth — ■ 



THE PITT FAMILY 141 

and this real man was expressed quite crudely in the po- 
litical squibs of the day. Here is one of them: 

When from an old Woman by standing his Ground 
He had got the possession of ten thousand Pound, 
He said that he cared not what others might call him, 
He would show himself now the true son of Sir Balaam. 

When Balaam was poor he was full of Renown, 
But now that he's rich he's the jest of the Town ; 
Then let all men learn by his foul disgrace 
That Honesty's better by far than a Place. 

The title of this embarrassing production of rhymer's 
art was "The Unembarrassed Countenance." It would 
be impossible to sum up more precisely the essence of 
the elder Pitt's public career. It was his colossal impu- 
dence. He could contradict to-day what he had sworn 
yesterday; and to-morrow declare that he was right both 
times. Mark Twain once wrote that man is the only 
animal that blushes. William Pitt did not come within 
the definition; for he never blushed. 

The early history of the elder Pitt is the story of a man 
who was building himself a political position with scarcely 
an inward glance at his conscience or a moment's thought 
for the welfare of others. A mass of overheated emo- 
tions, he found very quickly that his great asset was the 
power of flamboyant speech. In other circles of life he 
would have gone on the travelling stage of melodrama. 
With the advantage of Eton behind him he could do 
better than a travelling company. He could take part in 
the permanent national theatre of Westminster, with 



142 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

Lyttleton and the Grenvilles. The method was well 
recognized : had he not at Eton been soaked in the Greek 
and Roman orators with that very intention? — just as a 
boy at the technical schools is deliberately taught wood- 
work or printing, so that he may become a carpenter or 
a printer. We must give William Pitt and his old school 
all due credit; the one was a most excellent pupil and 
the other a most efficient master. Pitt became the most 
skilful actor that the Houses of Parliament have seen — 
and they are the houses of actors. Pitt knew all the tricks 
of the trade : he could "make up" better than anyone else. 
When he knew he had a poor case in logic, he played to 
the emotions. He would appear in the House swathed 
in bandages, the heroic patriot who never would forsake 
his country, be his gout in its last agony. Carried to 
the door by his servants — one feels certain that Pitt had 
got the idea from an old Roman fresco — he would crawl 
to his seat aided by his friends inside the bar. On the 
hottest of days he would pile on the more blankets, if the 
picture could be improved thereby. His speeches would 
glance sideways, as it were, at his grievous physical state. 
But it will be replied that he really had gout. True; 
and never did the lame and blind beggars in the street 
so cleverly turn their deformities into a source of income. 
But the best of actors must have some sort of lines 
for his tongue : it cannot be all gesture or sound — though 
the devotees of the Russian ballet may dispute the gen- 
eralization. Perhaps it will suffice to say that a great 
actor must have a passionate part, at least if he be of the 
melodramatic school of the Pitts and the Burkes. Pitt 
quickly found his particular passion — which he was so 
soon to tear to ribbons. He took for his theme just 



THE PITT FAMILY 143 

what we would have expected the grandson of Thomas, 
the Diamond King and Indian merchant prince, to choose. 
He chose the poem of the British Empire. In his mind 
it became that dream of romance that her first lover is 
to the schoolgirl. It was emotion painted with rainbows 
and sweetened with the honey of hysteria. The British 
Empire became Pitt's master passion: he adored it 
without reason; he would appear, if we may judge by 
his conduct, to have thought that to reason of his mistress 
was to slight her honour. He ruled England by a whirl- 
wind of rhetoric. It was the method and mind of the 
gushing schoolgirl translated to suit the habits of a 
very pompous gentleman whose chief characteristics were 
ambitious pride and gout. But there is one qualification 
that must be made, lest any should think this criticism 
too harsh. In judging the career of this man whom the 
historians find to be one of the most ideal of English 
statesmen, it is necessary to remember that, in the medical 
sense, he was not entirely sane. Sir Andrew Clark, a 
great modern doctor, who considered his history from 
the professional point of view, has given the following 
verdict: "Suppressed gout disordered the whole nervous 
system and drove him into a state of mental depression 
varying with excitement and equivalent to insanity." We 
have to face the fact (surely a sufficiently curious one) 
that this historians' hero was half a madman. It cer- 
tainly is a useful clue to Pitt's political philosophy; but 
it is strange that the historians should have risked so 
many of their eggs in such a frail basket. But that is 
their affair to explain: the worship of the half insane will 
scarcely appeal to the more scientific students. 

This half-madman's dream of a British Empire was of 



144 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

course neither a romance nor a dream in its origin. It 
was the very cool plan of a small group of financiers and 
merchants who desired the world, or as much of it as 
possible, for their trading ground. Imperialism is the 
creed of bankers and commercial travellers ; and the tools 
of their accomplishment are the high-spirited boys who 
are half educated at Eton and Harrow. And where 
would one have more hopefully sought this creed than 
from the mouth of Pitt? His grandfather had proved 
that the gospel was better than a gospel — it was a pay- 
ing proposition. The grandson had learned his part of 
the transaction — the pure sentiment — at the proper 
schools. He was just the creature to put the Imperialist 
case into that attractive language which could persuade 
the English nation that what had been good for a Pitt 
was necessarily good for a People. Of course the argu- 
ment would not bear the weight of logic for a moment: it 
was economically impossible for every Imperialist to 
find another Pitt Diamond, or if they had all found one, 
then the value would have been somewhere near the 
price of the best coal instead of the best jewels. So 
Imperialism's only hope was a screen of rhetoric and 
highfalutin. Pitt was the supreme man for the task. He 
persuaded his fellow-countrymen that they must make the 
family fortunes of many more families, like unto the 
successful Pitts — then, by some strange process, not fully 
revealed, Englishmen would become happy and great. 
Such was the gospel of the British Empire : and many 
honest men have fought and died for it. But then many 
honest men have worshipped false gods. 

William Pitt reached that final triumph of the great 
actor: he convinced himself. It would be too grotesque 



THE PITT FAMILY 145 

to believe anything else. One has moments of ungener- 
ous scepticism, of tempestuous doubts of Pitt's sincerity, 
when, again and again, one comes across cases where 
the lowest self-seeking seems the only plausible reason 
for his deeds. When he attacked Walpole, for instance, 
because the Duchess of Marlborough offered him ten 
thousand pounds. Is there any definition of patriotism 
which will cover that, and many similar actions, where 
he opposed, when seeking office, exactly what he carried 
into practice immediately office was granted him? When 
it suited his game he denounced the subsidies to foreign 
States; when the cards demanded it, he was ready to 
double them. He cursed Walpole, in the manner of the 
best tragedian, for being ready to make terms with Spain 
instead of crushing her by arms; yet, when Carteret suc- 
ceeded Walpole, with a fiercer war policy, Pitt and his 
friends began shrieking again, because Carteret tried to 
make military use of our alliance with Hanover. Being 
a sentimentalist, apparently Pitt preferred to fight a war 
without allies. Carteret was denounced as "an execrable 
Minister who seemed to have drunk the potion described 
in poetic fiction which made men forget their country." 
Hanover was merely "a despicable electorate." When 
the Pelhams turned out Carteret and continued his policy, 
it was Pitt who came to their rescue in 1745; and with 
many bandages and threats of dying before their eyes, 
told the House of Commons that there really had been 
a difference in policy — though nobody could see it! In 
short, Pitt used his rhetoric for any cause that promised 
most for his political future. 

The Spanish War was perhaps the watershed between 
the tolerant internationalism of Walpole and the intoler- 



146 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

able imperialism of Pitt and his school. It is typical of 
Pitt's whole career, and may be taken as a test case. 
Walpole, as we have seen, was not a pirate by nature; 
he was a gentleman; he believed that England should 
become great and rich, but by ways of reasoning and 
diplomacy, without antagonizing the world, without wast- 
ing treasures of munitions and blood. When it was quite 
possible that Walpole might have come to some satis- 
factory compromise with Spain, Pitt started shrieking like 
a child that has been frightened beyond control. When 
England's imperial place in the world was in debate Pitt 
was hysterical — there is scarcely any other word that will 
meet the case. If the name of our great rivals, the 
Bourbons, was mentioned, then Pitt "saw red" — there is 
no other phrase. Now, a man that "sees red" is alto- 
gether admirable in the front trenches; but is it quite 
wise to put him on the general staff? Are our historians 
well advised when they classify Pitt as a great states- 
man, when half his life he was charging over the fields 
of political battle with his eyes almost leaving their 
sockets? Remember, that is not an exaggerated picture 
of Pitt's psychology. There were moments when his 
mental progress was appallingly like a mad dog racing 
down the middle of the road. In the case of the Spanish 
War, he was so blinded by passion that he told the 
House that there was no danger in doing what we pleased, 
for Spain would not fight! In other words, he had not 
the slightest conception of the facts; for Spain did fight. 
The man who was shrieking for war in 1739 had been 
yelling to reduce the army in 1738 — just because it 
seemed an opportunity for opposing Walpole. When 
they had driven Walpole into war, the "Patriots" still 



THE PITT FAMILY 147 

shrieked; for it was not war they wanted — it was office. 
Pitt actually demanded that the instructions to the admi- 
rals should be published. It is not usual for a statesman 
to call for the publication of the plan of campaign. Even 
a drummer-boy would hesitate to do that. 

The explanation of Pitt is partly his conceit that he 
was always right and partly his want of brains. Being a 
sentimentalist, he built up a little collection of general 
principles — which were really not principles at all, but 
mainly rash generalizations of the ways of the small 
world that surrounded Mr. Pitt and his friends — whence, 
for example, this creed of the British Empire. Then, 
again, there were those first principles for successful poli- 
ticians which the Whigs had used so cleverly to float them 
down the turbulent stream of the Revolution of 1688. 
There were all those phrases about Liberty of the Sub- 
ject, Liberty of Parliament, and the rest of them, which 
were more pious than practical in their effects. But what 
was good enough to put the Whig aristocrats and City 
merchants in the seat of government was in Pitt's eyes 
good enough to keep them there, including himself. So 
that sacred phrase, Liberty of the People, is thick in Pitt- 
oratory. It burst forth in its full glow during the quarrel 
with the Americans. Then Pitt tore the passion to rib- 
bons with many a palatial gesture; but how much he was 
in earnest when he thundered for liberty for the colonists 
may be judged when we remember that his last great 
speech was an equally tempestuous cry that, fall the heav- 
ens, rise the earth, we must never give the States inde- 
pendence : "My lords, His Majesty succeeded to an 
Empire as great in extent as its reputation was unsullied. 
Shall we tarnish the lustre of this nation by an ignominious 



148 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

surrender of its rights and fairest possessions?" When 
the colonists had first thrown down the challenge to our 
rule, Pitt had railed at the Government because it would 
not repeal the Stamp Act, but he added : "At the same 
time let the sovereign authority of this country over the 
Colonies be asserted in as strong terms as can be devised, 
and be made to extend to every point of legislation what- 
soever, that we may bind them in their trade, confine 
their manufactures and exercise every power whatsoever 
— except that of taking their money out of their pocket 
without their own consent." Considering that such a 
policy had as much chance of appeasing the Americans 
as throwing a chocolate to a man-eating tiger, it is clear 
that in this great incident of his career Pitt played the 
part of an innocent child. Mr. Lecky has called atten- 
tion to the fact that Pitt, until the last moment, seemed 
unaware that the Stamp Act was of the slightest impor- 
tance one way or another: "There is not the smallest 
evidence that either Pitt or Cumberland or any of the 
other statesmen who were concerned in the negotiations 
were conscious that any serious question was impending 
in America." The normal historian who writes so re- 
spectfully of the statesmen of the eighteenth century does 
not seem aware that the greater number of them were 
such incompetent persons that they would have brought 
a coffee-stall to bankruptcy. But that is a longer story. 
The man who talked of satisfying the Americans by 
fine phrases of abstract liberty, and defied them in the 
next speech, was not a statesman. But the same loose 
romanticism peeps out from every thought of the man. 
Burke — no mean judge of the sentimental, surely — tells 
us of Chatham: "The least peep into the royal closet 



THE PITT FAMILY 149 

intoxicated him." Indeed, he was drunk with romantic 
fancies all his life — except when he was a sound realist 
in pursuit of a good office as quickly as he could get it. 
But even then he played the virtuous knight. He wal- 
lowed in the luxury of the thought that he, William 
Pitt, was unspotted by the world. When the Boy Patri- 
ots voted for the subsidies which they had before de- 
nounced as treachery to their country, Lyttleton and the 
Grenvilles were too ashamed of themselves to go beyond 
a silent vote: but Pitt had the calm conceit to imagine 
that he could explain his conduct in a speech. The con- 
temptuous pamphlets of the day show how he failed; but 
it is doubtful if this sublime egotist really saw how foolish 
he appeared: just as, dressed in the robes of his new 
earldom, perhaps he never realized how the City mer- 
chants were pointing with angry jeers at the man who 
had protested for a generation that he served his country 
without desire for honour or reward. 

But Pitt's personal character is a little matter — in more 
senses than one. What was of infinite account was that 
this unbalanced intellect, this creature at the sport of 
every emotion, by the freak of fortune got control of the 
State of Great Britain. Empire-building was in part a 
sport, in part a fancy to him; sometimes merely an agree- 
able theme for the office-hunter and party politician; a 
war or a peace might easily hang on a petty twist of his 
thoughts. Choiseul, the French Prime Ministe.r, wrote : 
"What we fear is that this proud and ambitious man, 
having lost the popular favour, may wish to recover from 
his fall by war-like exploits." A fairly damning thing, 
surely, when the Prime Ministers of Europe, writing 
private instructions to their ambassadors (as Choiseul 



i$o MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

was doing in this letter), should seriously estimate that 
Chatham might go to war because the City of London 
had pointed contemptuously at his new coronet. Was 
Pitt so dull-witted that he did not realize what war meant, 
or who paid the price of it? Did he really not know who 
was getting the spoils? It was surely no secret. Lord 
Chesterfield knew quite well when he wrote : "The point 
of profit is more important than the point of honour with 
our military dignitaries. Provided they can avoid defeat, 
they are ready also to avoid victory, as either event would 
deprive them of their incomes." Chesterfield was not 
writing vaguely, he had the courage to name his man, for 
he continued : "Lord Loudoun, a disgustingly avaricious 
character, has perhaps thought, indeed I may say actually 
did think, that a victory would be disadvantageous to 
him, as likely to put an end both to the war and to his 
enormous receipts." That — like the Pitt Diamond — was 
one of the most direct results of the Pitts' wild adven- 
tures in building up a British Empire; and if Chatham 
was so simple as not to know it, then he seems to have 
little right to all the carols that have been rung (with 
a few honourable exceptions) from almost every histori- 
cal belfry in his praise. 

Let the student read again the facts of Chatham's life, 
apart from the comments of those whose business it is to 
pass historical judgments; and let him candidly ask him- 
self whether Pitt was really a great man. That he was 
picturesque is granted : but his were the trappings of melo- 
drama rather than of statesmanship. A fine figure of a 
man indeed, a man for the pageants and ceremonies ; full 
of all the arts that show best in the limelight. With our 



THE PITT FAMILY 151 

whole hearts we may exclaim, "Mais quel geste !" But 
when we have said that, is there very much more left to 
be said of the Earl of Chatham? After a century of 
historical eulogies we have forgotten the thinly veiled 
contempt with which this rhetorical Earl was regarded 
by his contemporaries who knew him at first hand. Hor- 
ace Walpole probably gives us the true estimate when he 
wrote on Chatham's death: "Well, with all his faults, 
Lord Chatham will be a capital historic figure. ... I 
shall certainly not go to the funeral. I go to no puppet 
shows. . . . He is already as forgotten as John of 
Gaunt. . . . The late appearance of enthusiasm about 
Lord Chatham was nothing but a general affectation. 
It was a convention of hypocrisy . . . which did not last 
even until his burial." 

If Chatham is a disappointment, his younger son is as 
unsubstantial as a shadow cast on a sea mist. He is only 
the shadow of a shadow. In historical fact he was merely 
the echo of a dead voice; we can say still more exactly, 
the understudy of a great actor. The day had come when 
there should have been a brief notice at the door of the 
Westminster Theatre: "Owing to the death of the Earl 
of Chatham, the part of God of England will hence- 
forward be played by Mr. William Pitt, junior." It 
would be impossible for the most precise of scientific 
historians to get nearer to the truth by any more ponder- 
ous explanations in terms of laws, or economics or political 
phrases. The Pitts were not much concerned with legis- 
lation; of the rules of economics even their worst ene- 
mies never accused them; they could scarcely have written 
a rational paragraph on the science of government. 



152 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

When the elder Pitt died, one statesman did not give 
place to another. Only a great actor died and was suc- 
ceeded by his understudy. 

Old Thomas Pitt had possessed the best brains and 
energy of his family.' Chatham had a large share of 
energy, even if he was not blessed by the good fairies 
with brains. But compared with his younger son, 
Chatham was quite a monumental erection. He rushed 
into war with the chaotic energy of a bull, but he certainly 
did know how to use his horns. He was a child in 
politics, but when it came to planning a campaign that 
required nerve and imagination, then the elder Pitt was 
no fool, as his foreign enemies could best judge. But his 
son, who by some miraculous intervention of historical 
writers has got the reputation of saving England from 
the French, was, in fact, one of the most incompetent 
war administrators that even this badly administered na- 
tion has ever endured. Mr. Fortescue, the first in posi- 
tion of our military historians, has summed up the posi- 
tion in brief words which would have annihilated the 
reputations of most statesmen: "In 1796 Pitt had 
squandered in his military operations tens of thousands of 
men and millions of money to no purpose whatever; and 
had acquired, with the exception of the Cape of Good 
Hope, nothing but pestilential tropical islands, many of 
them hopelessly devastated, and all more deadly than war 
itself to the British soldiers. France was not appreciably 
weaker for all his efforts ; whereas England was left liter- 
ally without an army." Mr. Fortescue continues that 
Pitt had "studiously neglected both the Navy and the 
Army . . . the private soldier had, in fact, no alterna- 
tive but to starve or desert, for his pay was too slight to 



THE PITT FAMILY 153 

keep him alive. This is no exaggeration, but the literal 
truth. Yet Pitt took no notice of the matter whatever. 
. . . Not till January 1792 was a small pittance granted 
to ameliorate the lot of the British soldier, and then only 
by direct intervention of the King. . . . The state of the 
Navy was even worse." In the case of anyone but a Pitt, 
this might have been ascribed to a cultured horror of 
war and a flat refusal to be responsible for it. But that 
a Pitt should neglect the Army and Navy when the family 
believed in very little else but brute force — that a Pitt 
should leave the soldiers and sailors out of his scheme 
was as astonishing and unnatural as if the angels had 
forgotten virtue or the devils had neglected to encourage 
vice. It was flying in the face of their destiny. 

The story of the military plans of the younger Pitt 
reads rather like the marching of troops in a comic opera 
than the operations of real war. He scattered his small 
armies all over the world because he had not enough 
knowledge to discover where they would be most usefully 
concentrated. When he sent an expedition to Toulon, 
it was of three thousand men; he might as well have 
sent three dozen, for he was clearly told that fifty thou- 
sand were necessary to do the work. But he had no 
more to send, for the rest were spread in every imaginable 
corner of the earth where it was tolerably certain they 
would be caught and killed by fever before they had 
caught or killed their enemy. 

But there is little cause for surprise that Pitt was 
neither ready for the war nor capable of planning it if 
he had been prepared. He had been bred in a world 
of dreams, not the world of reality. His education was 
not unlike the simple process of blowing up a toy balloon 



154 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

with gas. Poor little William had pumped into him every 
vaporous sentiment that could be blended with the art 
and theory of governing England. He was taught that 
his father had served his country as no one had served 
it so well before; and the son set out on the same mis- 
sion with his teeth firmly set, as a ballet-dancer comes on 
to the stage with a firmly set smile. He was the son of 
his father, for he was trained as the first sentimentalist 
in Europe; his mother's part in him seems to have been 
to give him so fragile a body that he could not even be 
sentimental with vigour. At the age of eleven this is 
how the precious young hope of England was writing: 
"The views were enough enlivened thereby to prevent 
the drowsy Morpheus from taking the opportunity of 
the heat to diffuse his poppies upon the eyes of the 
travellers." A boy who wrote like that was fairly 
certain to grow up a prig and a fool. And the young 
Pitt fulfilled every promise of his youth. Scarcely once 
did he touch earth all the time he was governing England. 
He was living in the poppy-world of his boyish letter. 
In the world of romance he would make an attractive 
figure in a domestic comedy — the young man who is too 
sickly to succeed. When the great war with France 
was on the verge of eruption, the Prime Minister of 
England, from all that can be discovered in his papers 
and despatches, seems to have been unconscious of its 
imminence. The immediate safety of England turned on 
the action of Holland; and Pitt seems to have been un- 
aware that there was a Dutch crisis at all. He was down 
at Hollwood planting trees in his new garden. It 
reminds us of the days when his father did not realize 
that there was any chance of a war with America. 



THE PITT FAMILY 155 

Pitt has been praised by some for his liberality of 
thought because he hesitated so long before declaring war 
against the new Government of France : it is suggested 
that he was a lover of liberty at heart, and that it was an 
unwilling fate that made him interfere with the internal 
affairs of a neighbouring people. The historians who 
have built up the picture of this ideal Pitt surely must see 
that it was, at the beginning, all to the good of England — 
in a Jingo sense, and England at that time meant the rule 
of Jingo politicians and manufacturers — that France 
should tear herself to pieces, and so be weaker in trade 
and in empire. The coldest-blooded of autocrats and 
plutocrats in England must have been glad to see the 
beginning of the French Revolution — for, being also very 
short-sighted persons, they were unable to see that begin- 
nings sometimes have ends, and the end might not neces- 
sarily be in France, but on this side of the disinfecting 
Channel. So Pitt as a kindly critic of France when she 
first burst into flames was quite in keeping with the most 
orthodox supporter of the British Constitution and the 
British Empire. But when he thought that the people of 
this country were interested in the Revolution, not as 
rivals but as sympathetic friends, then he, who pretended 
to be so calm and dignified, took panic, and began to hit 
out wildly on every side, as a police constable sometimes 
loses his head in a crowd. Pitt began to throw overboard 
all his professed ideals of Civil Liberty and Reform, as 
a fine lady would throw overboard her jewels to lighten 
a sinking boat. He rushed through a Traitorous Corre- 
spondence Bill; he suspended the Habeas Corpus Act; 
he flooded the land with spies; a Treasonable Practices 
Act, a Seditious Meetings Act; endless prosecutions of 



156 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

supposed revolutionaries; such were the signs of Pitt's 
terror and the shallowness of his love of liberty. His 
Liberalism disappeared into the abyss of the Revolution 
as a stone sinks into the sea; and it scarcely left even a 
bubble or two on the surface to mark the place of its 
grave. There would have been a reasonable case for 
maintaining that the French Revolution was not the 
friend of Democracy, but rather the tool of the new 
Plutocrats. But it would be absurd to think that the 
leader of English Plutocracy had any such views when 
he eventually declared war on the new spirit in France. 
Pitt was afraid of the French Revolution because he 
thought it really did mean the beginning of Democracy. 
He had not sufficient knowledge to suspect that the Ter- 
ror was mainly the work of a few self-seeking adven- 
turers. 

Pitt's career was marked by the tombstones of those 
idols that it had pleased his family to set up for worship 
in their ancestral temple. There was the tradition that 
they were the sworn opponents of corruption in Parlia- 
ment. The younger Pitt clung to power by turning the 
House of Lords into a palace for the bribed. When he 
first took office there were scarcely 250 peers in the 
House: in nineteen years Pitt had added 140 more. As 
Disraeli said: "He made peers of second-rate squires 
and fat graziers. He caught them in the alleys of Lom- 
bard Street and clutched them from the counting-houses 
of Cornhill." He is said to have spent one-sixth of his 
time dealing with applications for offices and titles. He 
gained a reputation for occasionally standing up to men 
who threatened him with revenge if he would not grant 
their requests ; but the House of Lords, as the home of 



THE PITT FAMILY 157 

modern Plutocracy, remains to this day as the best proof 
of how often Pitt did not resist these threats. The Pitts 
were the founders of the British Empire; and the rule 
of the Rich, which was always the clear intention of that 
Imperialism, has its monument in Pitt's House of Lords. 
The Pitts founded Plutocracy as a vital political force. 
Then, again, there was that tradition that the Pitts 
were fearless in stating their views. It is a sadly moth- 
eaten story, and there never was much in it. But it had 
been at least a plausible tale in the days of the Earl of 
Chatham; for he thundered so loudly in the Houses of 
Parliament that it really sounded as though he were 
defying Jupiter and all Olympus. As a matter of fact, 
he was usually not doing much except tear his own con- 
victions of last week, or last month, into ribbons — but 
he made so much noise that'the details of the argument 
were generally lost in the tumult. Be that as it may, 
in the case of the younger Pitt, nobody could say that 
he was ready to die for his convictions. His life is the 
story of how he ran away from them whenever they were 
put to the practical test. Take the case of Catholic 
Emancipation. Pitt had given a pledge, which an hon- 
ourable man would have held binding, that if the Irish 
accepted the Union, Catholic Emancipation would im- 
mediately follow. But Pitt weakly allowed himself to be 
tossed from one position to another until it was too late 
to make any stand in defence of his promise; and, finally, 
he behaved like a coward by giving the King a pledge 
that he would not raise the question of emancipation again 
during hrs reign. He certainly had the decency to resign : 
but a man of honour does not pledge himself not to fulfil 
his pledges — which was what Pitt had done by his promise 



158 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

to the King. Even if we look at the incident from the 
standpoint of the Constitution, is it not somewhat strange 
that it should be a Pitt — one of this family that has got 
into our history-books as the builders of the theory of par- 
liamentary government — that it should be one of this race 
that in the beginning of the nineteenth century should 
surrender the hardly won rights of the previous century; 
when it was decided (one is told) that it was the Minis- 
ters and the Houses of Parliament who governed 
England, and not an absolute monarchy. For that, 
surely, was what Pitt surrendered by his promise to 
George III. Once more, this younger Pitt pursued the 
craven course of running away from his family traditions 
as well as his pledge. But, in truth, the traditions of the 
Pitts were as imaginary as their promises. 

Ireland gives us another disillusion concerning the 
moral courage of the younger Pitt. The most Tory his- 
torians, the most bigoted Protestants, have admitted that 
the behaviour of English administrators and English 
armies in suppressing the Irish rebellions during Pitt's 
ministry was an unforgivable blot on the English name. 
Let no one imagine that it was in keeping with the ethics 
of the age, and therefore not so horrifying to its con- 
temporaries as to ourselves. On the contrary, it revolted 
every decent man, soldier or civilian, who knew what was 
happening in Ireland. Sir John Moore wrote in 1797 
that he had "seen in Ireland the most absurd, as well as 
the most disgusting tyranny that any nation ever groaned 
under"; and he was ignored. When Ralph Abercrombie 
arrived to command the operations, he declared in a gen- 
eral order to his men that: "The conduct of the troops 
in this kingdom proved the army to be in a state of 



THE PITT FAMILY 159 

licentiousness which must render it formidable to every- 
one but the enemy." Pitt at once took the side of the 
scoundrels, and Abercrombie was compelled to resign. 
Then Cornwallis arrived as both Lord Lieutenant and 
Commander-in-Chief, and his verdict was: "The Irish 
Militia are totally without discipline, contemptible before 
the enemy when any serious resistance is made to them, 
but ferocious and cruel in the extreme when any poor 
wretches with or without arms come within their power." 
Such were the methods by which Pitt's Government was 
ruling Ireland; and one can only ask whether Pitt would 
have disregarded so many warnings if he had not been 
a great deal of a coward and an accomplice in the crime. 
It is full time that the whole vocabulary of the English 
language is used in the history-books; not merely a few 
colourless words which are supposed to maintain impar- 
tial judgment, but which, in fact, so often express a 
series of deliberate lies. If, for example, we want to 
tell the truth about English rule in Ireland at this time, 
we can only say quite frankly that it was the rule of cads 
and hooligans — and if William Pitt was the First Min- 
ister, the necessary inference must be drawn. A man 
who wanted to govern justly, and had the brains to carry 
his wishes into action, would not have needed so many 
protests from his officials before he took action — if indeed 
Pitt ever did try to do justice to Ireland. He tricked 
Irishmen, or bribed them wholesale, into a Union; and we 
have spent over a hundred years recovering from this 
blind folly of a man who has been trumpeted in the his- 
tory-books as one of England's greatest statesmen. If the 
historians have any right to pass judgment dead against 
the evidence, then the Pitt Myth may be miscalled his- 



160 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

tory: measured against the facts, it seems remarkably 
near a superstition. 

One searches in vain for some certain evidence that a 
Pitt was ever ready to sacrifice his prospects for the sake 
of his principles; and the longer one searches the more 
sceptical one becomes whether he had any principles worth 
discovering. He had plenty of pretty phrases — but they 
were the regular stock-in-trade of the Pitt family. His- 
tory is too often the record of what statesmen have merely 
said; what shall we call the very different record of what 
men have actually done? Pitt the Younger talked much 
of reforming the Constitution, but it ended — in talk. 
Think of all the rhetoric he poured over the slave trade; 
yet the fact remains that it was not his life but his death 
that seemed to clear the way for that measure of reform 
which passed almost immediately he died. His friend 
Wilberforce, who has come down in history as so ardent 
a friend of the oppressed, turns out, on closer inspection, 
to be not quite what one expected from the historians' 
eulogies. When the working classes lost their right of 
trade-union defence, which was taken from them by the 
two Acts of 1799 and 1800, it was Pitt and Wilberforce 
who pressed these measures through. For once these 
"reformers" seem to have been roused to energy: an 
attack on Capitalism meant danger to the whole social 
order which these politicians knew to be the basis of their 
existence. "Owing to Pitt's haste to pass a Bill for 
repressing Trade Unionism, working men had had no 
opportunity of making their views known to Parliament 
before the Bill became law. Next year Parliament was 
flooded with petitions of protest from all parts of the 
country," is the summing up of Mr. and Mrs. Hammond 



THE PITT FAMILY 161 

in their Town Labourer, the most truthful book on the 
industrial history of this period. 

But it would be unreasonable to blame Pitt for not 
being a social reformer of the modern type. For he had 
not received any education which allowed him to grasp 
economic affairs, whether on the side of the rich or the 
poor. The extraordinary exhibition of his intellect in 
the matter of the Sinking Fund proves that we are dealing 
with a mind that was incapable of going beyond the most 
elementary facts: we are clearly in the presence of a man 
who had the qualities which give high rank in the world 
of politicians, but would have put him at the bottom of 
an average sixth-form class. Pitt thought he had dis- 
covered (thanks to Dr. Price) a method by which the 
National Debt could be paid off by a miracle. He pro- 
posed to allot one million pounds of taxes every year to 
buying Consols ; allowing the whole sum to accumulate at 
compound interest until it reached £4,000,000 interest per 
annum. This, with the £1,000,000 a year still to be raised 
by taxation, was to be devoted to buying national bonds 
at the rate of £5,000,000 a year, on which interest would 
lapse, "the nominal capital being transferred to the credit 
of the Commissioners until it amounted to the same sum 
as the National Debt." So far the scheme was plausible, 
at least. But the miracle began when Pitt apparently 
thought that he could raise loans with one hand to pay 
them off with the other; and that, miracle of miracles, 
it was even possible to pay off the debt by raising new 
loans at a higher rate of interest than the loans he was 
paying off. It is a little difficult to discuss such a scheme 
patiently. Perhaps the verdict of McCulloch, the econo- 
mist, may meet the case : "This worthless compound of 



1 62 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

delusion and absurdity ... we doubt if the history of 
the world can furnish another instance of so extraordi- 
nary an infatuation." It was William Pitt, the idol of 
our school histories, who gave this delusion and absurd 
infatuation to his adoring country as his contribution to 
the national finance. One rubs one's eyes in amazement. 
It would seem that if these Pitts are to survive in history 
they must be measured by the standards of a lunatic 
asylum, and not by the rules of sane men. For Pitt's 
Sinking Fund has none of the elements of sanity. The 
best excuse put forward for him is that he knew he 
was talking nonsense; that he deliberately fooled the 
nation in the hope that it would get, in those critical days, 
an illusion of national security which the Pitt brain was 
not capable of supplying in fact by sound finance. But 
such a theory means that the Pitts were a race of charla- 
tans : they should rank not with the statesmen, but with 
the great conjurers of the music-hall stage. The Sinking 
Fund is a landmark in the life of Pitt — the historians 
appearing to think that it is a symbol of his greatness. 
It is indeed a symbol, but of his futility, not his strength. 
It proclaims him as a mere amateur in statesmanship — 
for Pitt was the lazy lounger to his finger-tips. It is said 
he rarely rose until midday, and he rarely did any work 
after he had dined. Perhaps he was wise in this last reso- 
lution; for so often after dinner he was helplessly intoxi- 
cated. On that memorable day in 1793 when war was 
declared between England and France, William Pitt 
arrived at the House of Commons drunk. When Fox 
was speaking, Pitt was being sick behind the Speaker's 
chair. He had seen no signs that the greatest war in 
the world was beginning; he had naturally taken no steps 



THE PITT FAMILY 163 

to prepare for what he could not see; a year before, in 
1792, he had reduced taxation, which meant that he was 
preparing for peace, not for war. When the war came, 
Pitt said it would be "a very short war, and certainly 
ended in one or two campaigns." When one remembers 
the brilliant skill and superhuman energy of Carnot and 
the men who controlled the French War Office, and com- 
pares them with this amateur statesman William Pitt, 
one only wonders that he was not right, and that two 
campaigns did not see us crushed out of existence. For- 
tunately, we were able to survive until Pitt was dead, an 
event which was probably worth many new armies to the 
British nation. We had to fight through these gravest 
years under a First Minister who mistook stiff manners 
for strength and replaced hard thinking by platitudes. 
Neither in his general conceptions nor in his details did 
Pitt ever rise above the level of the commonplace. 
William the Younger was not corrupt; he did not possess 
enough brains to have kept himself afloat for a week in 
a life of crime, for crime needs skill of a sort. He was 
an intellectual nonentity rather than a knave. If he had 
not been his father's son, English history would never 
have heard of him. He would have been an ideal small 
squire, and every thoughtful mother of daughters would 
have held him up as an ideal husband — for he looked 
quite a gentleman, even when he was drunk every other 
evening. We do not yet realize that conceit and an 
innate capacity for "bounce" — for rising again after any 
humiliation or mistake — were the main elements that 
brought fame and fortune to the two Pitts. Intellect 
and moral character are both negligible factors in their 
careers. Never in history has the popular estimate 



1 64 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

wandered so far away from the facts as when the Pitts 
have been judged by their rhetoric rather than by their 
deeds. It is time to reconsider them as real beings — 
not as mythological creations. One has but attempted 
here to suggest the outlines of their true pictures. With 
such a hint, the details may be filled in from any history- 
book — and every one of them will disprove almost 
every deduction that the orthodox historians have drawn. 
Instead of deciding, with the historians, that the two 
Pitts were great statesmen, one is tempted to suspect 
more than the mere link of a name with that charming 
lady of Covent Garden Theatre, Ann Pitt, their con- 
temporary. The critics concisely summed her up in a 
phrase which meets the case of her namesakes in a quite re- 
markable fashion; for they said that she possessed an 
"important pertness in manner and a volubility of 
tongue." When one thinks of Chatham at Westminster, 
one can draw all kinds of fantastic comparisons with 
"the best woman comedian in Covent Garden." But one 
hears the historians shuddering with disgust at such a 
low thought. 



CHAPTER V 

EDMUND BURKE 
(1729-I797) 

EDMUND BURKE was almost a new genus in the 
political life of England. He gained himself a 
position in public affairs because he was capable of 
thinking and writing — both comparatively new ideas in 
modern governing circles. It is true that his thoughts 
were usually wrong and his writings very misleading to 
the public mind; but the fact remains that this was a new 
method of climbing into power. Hitherto, history had 
seemed to prove that statesmanship depended on other 
qualities. Some men had won their way by the sword; 
it was one of the most primitive methods, but even as 
recently as Cromwell and Marlborough it had played a 
supreme part, Others had been the sons of dukes and 
such-like stately personages. Chatham and his kind had 
been superb actors of the melodramatic school. Shaftes- 
bury and the Restoration adventurers had made intrigue a 
fine art; they knew every step on all the back-stairs. There 
had even been successes made by sheer brilliancy; there 
was Carteret, who in the matter of brains might truly 
be compared with the best Toledo steel. Then Henry 
Fox had founded a great Liberal family by squeezing 
every farthing out of every public office he could lay his 
hands on. While the great Duke of Newcastle had 
ruled England for a generation for no other reason than 

165 



166 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

that he had so much money and so many parliamentary 
seats that nobody could outbid him or outvote him. 
That all such men had unusual intellect of a kind it 
would be stupid to deny; but it was a mere auxiliary to 
their main powers. 

Burke was in a hopeless position for one ambitious of 
reaching the governing seat. He had practically noth- 
ing but brains to offer his supporters. It was as if he 
had offered cowries in a land used to a gold coinage. He 
had neither rank nor a sword nor the intriguing mind. 
He certainly had a touch of Chatham's melodrama and 
sentimentality, and he had something that might be called 
brilliancy. But without that rather heavy quality called 
"intellect" and that power of plodding application, Burke 
would have failed. In truth, he did not reach anything 
of great importance; but for the moment one is com- 
paring him with his political rivals. For it is fairest to 
judge him as a politician. There have been many at- 
tempts to put him amongst the philosophers and the men 
who write books. It is a dangerous line of defence 
when Burke is concerned. After all, the greater part of 
his prime he spent in politics, and his literature was 
deliberately incidental to that career. 

Perhaps the legend of Burke the philospher grew 
around that first serious book of his, before he got into 
the political set. He published The Origin of our Ideas 
of the Sublime and the Beautiful when he was twenty- 
seven, and it bears all the symptoms of a pure and un- 
spotted youth. It is altogether important to examine 
this book if one desires to understand the later Burke; 
for, as in the case of most men, he really said nothing 
fundamentally new after his first essay — it is so rare to 



EDMUND BURKE 167 

think of anything fresh after the age of nineteen. There 
are two or three sentences in this first book that will con- 
vict their author of most of the virtues and vices which 
he afterwards more clearly revealed. Thus, in his sec- 
tion on "Terror" he wrote: "No passion so effectually 
robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning 
as fear." His great work on the French Revolution is 
only a somewhat unnecessary amplification and proof of 
that phrase. He was panic-stricken lest the Revolution 
should spread to England and involve himself and his 
ruling-class friends in the downfall of their fellows in 
France. He drove home the same idea in another sen- 
tence: "The passion caused by the great and sublime 
in nature ... is astonishment; and astonishment is that 
state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended 
with some degree of horror. In that case the mind is so 
entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any 
other, nor by consequence reason on that object which 
employs it. . . . It anticipates our reasoning, and 
hurries us on by an irresistible force." 

That paragraph might well go on Burke's tombstone, 
for it tells us more about the man than anything else he 
wrote or did. This first book is a careful study of the 
manner in which the mind of man is moved: in it we can 
almost see Burke perfecting himself in the arts by which 
a politician or an actor or an artist can play on the public 
keyboard. He tried to discover to a nicety what would 
affect the mind of the mob or the individual. "To make 
anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be 
necessary. . . . These despotic governments which are 
founded on the passions of men, keep their chief as much 
as may be from the public eye. The policy has been the 



168 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

same in many cases of religion. Almost all the heathen 
temples were dark." That was the corner of psychol- 
ogy on which Burke based his whole theory of govern- 
ment by a detached superior governing class. When 
he wrote, "Magnificence is likewise a source of the sub- 
lime," he was anticipating the day when the brilliancy 
of the Court of Versailles was to dazzle his impression- 
able eyes and make the splendour of Marie-Antoinette 
his pivot for the fate of France. 

In short, this essay on the Sublime and Beautiful ex- 
plains why Burke's future political career was that 
strange mixture of realistic common sense and uncon- 
trolled emotion. The master element in his life was the 
persistence with which he always allowed his intellect to 
be overborne by his emotions. Those who are kind to 
him will say that it proves that he was a great artist. 
While those who are unkind will declare that it es- 
tablishes Burke as the greatest sentimentalist among 
statesmen. As usual, the truth is probably somewhere 
between. But it must not be forgotten that there is an- 
other possibility. When one thinks of his early exami- 
nation of the emotions of man, the thought arises that 
perhaps Burke's apparent sentimentalism was as deliber- 
ate as the actor's art. This first essay is Burke in his 
dressing-room. His obvious capacity for close details 
in reasoning continually shakes the argument that he was 
by nature as unbalanced as his wilder flights of emotion 
might suggest. Is it possible that his florid language 
was a pose, or rather an art, to bend his audience to his 
will? Heine made even darker suggestions: "Burke 
possessed only a rhetorical talent wherein he combated, 
in the second part of his life, the Liberal principles which 



EDMUND BURKE 169 

he had honoured earlier. Did he intend by this change of 
opinions to gain the favour of the great? Did Sheri- 
dan's Liberal triumphs in the chapel of St. Stephen's 
determine him, out of jealousy and spite, to become 
champion of the past, of the Middle Ages, which af- 
forded a fertile field for romantic tirades and oratorical 
figures? Was he a knave or a fool? I cannot tell. 
But I think that there is always something suspicious 
when a man's change of principles is to the profit of the 
reigning power." 

But Burke can be fairly easily defended from such a 
gross charge, for it can be shown that he never possessed 
those "Liberal principles." He ended as he began: 
a firm believer in the privileges of the governing set and 
a humble worship under their throne. As for the sug- 
gestion that Burke became a champion of the Middle 
Ages, it exposes the tragic comedy of this statesman's 
career. Burke's ideal was the Revolution of 1688, and 
it was that event which finally decided that the Middle 
Ages had died; scarcely one stone of them was left stand- 
ing in a hundred years. If the Stuarts had survived it 
might have been different. But Burke's friends, the 
Whig plutocrats, made society "modern"; it was Burke's 
pet Revolution that buried the mediaeval traditions that 
died with Charles. He probably thought that he repre- 
sented the days of barons and troubadours, and hawking 
and tilting. But he had only seen the outside of that 
system and a few of the most alluring of its pictures. 
Of the real essence of mediaeval society Burke was as 
ignorant as a child. Its fundamental note of local and 
democratic government was the direct contradiction of 
Burke's implicit faith and respect for a governing class. 



170 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

Besides, his whole nature was a perpetual clash with the 
mediaeval mind. Remember, he had been educated in a 
Quaker school — not the best of seed-beds for a mediaeval 
philosophy! If, in spite of Burke's own phrase, it were 
possible to indict a whole age for a psychology, it might 
be said that there was something particularly joyful and 
a little reckless about the Middle Ages — reckless, that is, 
in the sense that there was not that continual self-an- 
alysis which seems the habit of more modern man. 
There was more living and less thinking about it, less 
weighing whether deeds and thoughts were right or 
wrong. 

Now, if ever there were a mind tending to introspec- 
tion it was Burke's. He would appear to have been ever- 
lastingly balancing right and wrong, continually dreading 
lest he was doing the wrong — sometimes becoming won- 
derfully ingenious in discovering arguments why it was 
right. In any case he was of the morose, bitter type, 
and so quarrelsome at last that his political contempo- 
raries (a fairly tolerant lot) could scarcely abide him. 
His literary friends seem to have found him more con- 
genial; and good judges of men (being good men them- 
selves) like Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds loved 
him dearly, perhaps because Burke was genial to every- 
body who would listen to his never-ending conversation. 
There we get near the heart of Burke : he was a talker 
and a thinker, and he was, therefore, not in any way 
a man likely to be attracted by a mediaeval age of action. 
Be that as it may, Burke was far less of a medievalist 
than Heine himself, because the Jew did believe in lib- 
erty, whereas the Irishman (reversing the usual order) 
did not; and democratic liberty was a much more essen- 



EDMUND BURKE 171 

tial part of the Middle Ages than of those highly central- 
ized monarchies of Europe which Burke worshipped on 
bended knee. 

It is a little difficult to choose the best manner of 
analysing Burke. When a man was essentially a writer 
and a talker, is it not better to discuss his opinions 
rather than his life? For is it not fairer to attach more 
importance to what he said, rather than to what he did? 
As a matter of fact, there is not much of importance 
about Burke except what he put down on paper: and it 
ought to be judged on its merits. Whether he was quite 
sincere when he wrote — whether, that is, he had deeper 
objects than the ones he admitted — is of course an inter- 
esting question, but it should not be the main one. Had 
he been a successful politician his real motives would 
have revealed themselves by his deeds — and it might 
have been imperative to weigh them against his words. 
But Burke was most unsuccessful in active public life. 
After being the chief intellectual prop of the Whig 
party for years, giving them a doctrine and helping to 
rescue them from all their scrapes, when the chance came 
of rewarding him with a Cabinet office, his patrons' 
courage failed them. They had discovered Burke to be 
such a bad-tempered, pig-headed person that it would 
have made their lives a misery to sit beside him on any 
committee. They were exceedingly sorry to disappoint 
him, and they gathered together round dinner tables to 
see whether they could not risk admitting him. But al- 
though it was largely owing to Burke's vigour in the 
House of Commons that North was compelled to resign 
in 178 1, yet he was not offered a seat in the new Cabinet, 
and had to be content with the lucrative, but more insig- 



172 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

nificant, post of Paymaster. Having honestly stuck to 
his friends and resigned with Fox, he again came in 
with his friends and regained the same post in the next 
year. It was then that he defended so violently two 
clerks in his department who were accused of stealing 
public moneys. One was convicted, and the other com- 
mitted suicide : neither of which events can be taken as 
evidence of innocency. Common talk said that one of 
them, the suicide, had been connected with the Burkes 
in some heavy gambling in Indian stock. Anyhow, the 
political world, not easily shocked by such things, was 
astounded at Burke's behaviour, seeing that it was one 
of his poses that he represented all the public and pri- 
vate virtues. So strong was the feeling that when Burke 
rose to address the House about this time, some of the 
members left the chamber with such manifest contempt 
that he sat down without speaking. 

Another matter which made his contemporaries a little 
anxious about Burke's company was the uncertainty 
where he got the money by which he maintained himself. 
His brother and his cousin were both desperate gamblers, 
and, so long as they did well, they appear to have supplied 
Edmund with cash. But they soon crashed; and for the 
last twenty-five years of his life Burke was living far 
above any apparent income (except during his short 
term of office as Paymaster). He seems to have had 
much money given him by his political patrons, all of 
which gives substance to Heine's suspicions, of course. 
We must not forget, also, that when Burke was delivering 
speeches in favour of the American Colonies, he was 
receiving seven hundred pounds a year as the official 
agent for New York. A man must Jive, of course ; and 



EDMUND BURKE 173 

Burke seems mainly to have lived by payments for his 
political services. It would be hard to prove he ever 
said anything insincere on that account. His paymasters 
were only wise in choosing a useful servant. Indeed, he 
had sufficient spirit to be exceedingly self-willed, and 
sufficient pride never to press unduly for any office as 
his reward. Nevertheless, he was not quite the knight- 
errant of Liberty that he has sometimes been painted. 

There is one other matter, and then his more private 
character can be put on one side for his public writing. 
In spite of the traditions of his great speeches, they were 
not, strictly speaking, at all great as rhetoric. Indeed, 
he bored the House so that he became known as "the 
dinner-bell" — when all members trooped home. Many 
of his orations read splendidly, and there are passages 
of great power. But taken all in all they did not ring 
true, so contemporaries have recorded. One knows a 
great deal about Burke after reading Fanny Burney's 
account of the Warren Hastings trial. Windham had 
told her that her prepossessions in favour of the prisoner 
would vanish when she had heard Burke; she would then 
hear "truth, reason, justice, eloquence. You will then see 
in other colours 'that man.' " Miss Burney admired both 
men so much, the prisoner and the accuser, that she might 
surely appear as an impartial witness. But in court her 
sympathies turned definitely to the side of Hastings. She 
had found Burke in his speech at first "perfectly irresisti- 
ble" for his charm of style. She wrote of "the eloquence, 
the imagination, the fire, the diversity of expression, 
and the ready flow of language with which he seemed 
gifted, in a most superior manner, for any and every pur- 
pose to which rhetoric could lead." Burke's emotional 



174 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

description of "those dreadful murders" almost swept 
this clever young lady along with the speaker: "He at 
last overpowered me; I felt my cause lost. . . . My 
eyes dreaded a single glance towards a man so accused 
as Mr. Hastings. ... I had no hope he could clear 
himself nor another wish in his favour remained." It 
was but a passing sensation; for when Burke proceeded, 
and his "charges of rapacity, cruelty, tyranny were gen- 
eral and made with all the violence of personal detesta- 
tion, and continued and aggravated without any further 
fact or illustration; then there appeared more of study 
than of truth, more of invective than of justice; and, in 
short, so little of proof to so much of passion." Miss 
Burney began to feel so indifferent, so unconvinced by 
this rhetorical avalanche, that "I found myself a mere 
spectator in a public place, and looking all around it with 
my opera-glass in my hand." She was telling all this to 
Windham; and it is interesting to note how that profes- 
sional politician (who was also a gentleman) took this 
criticism of one of his colleagues: "His eyes sought the 
ground on hearing this, and with no other comment than 
a rather uncomfortable shrug of the shoulders, he ex- 
pressively and concisely said, 'I comprehend you per- 
fectly.' " 

The sum of it all is that, in this great moment of his 
public life, Burke did not ring true. He made his audi- 
ence think that it was only another night at the play, 
when the plot was so uninteresting that one had to fall 
back on the audience. And it is clear that Windham, by 
that "uncomfortable shrug," admitted the truth of the 
novelist's keen analysis. Of course, it was mild to what 
Miss Burney continued to say about Fox, another of these 



EDMUND BURKE 175 

gentlemen who gave to the House of Commons so much 
time that would have been more appropriately spent be- 
hind the footlights. But for the moment we are consider- 
ing Burke. This criticism of the great speech at the 
Hastings trial was not an isolated example. The House 
of Commons only tittered when he flung on its floor the 
famous dagger that was meant to sum up all the horrors 
with which the French Revolution threatened England. 
Burke most obviously did not ring true. Take this case 
of Warren Hastings, and indeed the whole case concern- 
ing India. Burke devoted seven years to the prosecution; 
and after all that torrent of passion and eloquence — by 
reason of it, shall we say — the impeached man was ac- 
quitted on all the charges. It was a piteous failure for 
such a gigantic effort. Lord Teignmouth, who knew 
more about Indian affairs than most people, could only 
explain Burke's conduct during the trial by advancing 
the theory that he was not sane. But there was probably 
a genuine belief in Burke's mind that things happened 
under British control in India that ought not to happen. 
He was right, and the trial was a sharp reminder to 
hesitating adventurers that they must consider the honour 
of their race when they went fortune-seeking in foreign 
lands. But that Burke should have fixed on Hastings 
as a fit example, and that he should have turned a court 
of justice into a theatre and a politicians' bear-pit, is 
sufficient proof that he was not the man predestined to 
represent the national honour. He did not ring true. 

It had been the same, a few years before, when Burke 
was the imposing figure in the demand for the India Bill 
of 1783. He practically drafted the Bill, and was its 
chief supporter in the Commons. He did everything that 



176 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

rhetoric could do : but Lord Morley, in his Life of Burke, 
can only sum up: "The whole design was a masterpiece 
of hardihood, miscalculation and mismanagement." It 
was so typical of Burke's inconsistencies that, at this time 
when he was rattling the beams of Westminster Hall by 
his denunciations of corruption in India, he had just been 
trying to protect those two criminal clerks in his own 
public office in London. Further, one did not have to be 
very much of a cynic to hesitate to give the government 
of India — as this Bill proposed — into the hands of the 
ruling politicians. For at this moment these gentlemen 
were the allies of North and Fox, a combination which 
had made even the tarnished minds of Westminster be- 
gin to consider whether political compromise might not 
have a boundary to its indecencies. For Burke at this 
moment to ask Parliament to commit into such hands the 
government of India — which was not very far from the 
request — was as if the chief of highway robbers had 
begged to be made Governor of the Bank of England 
on his word of honour that he would live as a reformed 
man. Burke's word would always have been acceptable; 
but there would have been a continual dread lest this 
overstrung rhetorician and uncertain parliamentarian 
might commit some more of those continual blunders of 
taste and of fact that he was so ready to commit at home. 
To quote Lord Morley again : "Indian promotion would 
have followed parliamentary and party interest." The 
man who proposed to give India as a perquisite to the 
politicians of that age had none of the qualities of a 
philosopher, and very few of the signs of an honest man, 
the cynic might add. 

However, everything about Burke is of secondary im- 



EDMUND BURKE 177 

portance compared with his relations to the French Revo- 
lution, which almost entirely filled the last eight years 
of his life. In 1790 he was sixty-one years of age, and, 
after all his efforts, he had probably never been so un- 
popular. He had made a fool of himself during the 
Regency debates of 1788, when the Whigs hoped to 
break Pitt's power at last. It was all wasted time, for 
the King became sane again; but Burke's hysterical speech 
would have gone far to ruin the Whigs' chances in any 
case. As Windham wrote: "He is folly personified, but 
shaking his cap and bells under the laurels of genius. 
He finished his wild speech in a manner next to madness. 
. . . Half the kingdom considered him little better than 
a madman " Most people would have said that Burke, 
for good or evil, had finished his work in the world. In 
fact, he had scarcely begun it, if we measure by effect, 
and not by time and effort. The Revolution gave Burke 
his chance, as it were. He was born to be leading counsel 
in a sensational criminal case — that was his clear destiny. 
He had tried his hand on Hastings, but after a few years 
of him the prosecution's case was looking less promising. 
Burke was now to have another and a far greater chance. 
This time he was to try — not a single man — but a nation; 
and the appeal was to be, not to the court in Westminster 
Hall, but to the judgment seat of the World. Even the 
emotional Burke should have been satisfied at last. Here 
was a passion that he could tear into innumerable tatters. 
And he did. 

He published Re/lections on the Revolution in France 
in November 1790. It was his estimate of the acts of 
the first twelve months of the great upheaval, which may 
be dated from the storming of the Bastille, July 14, 1789. 



178 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

It was a matured estimate, for he had written and rewrit- 
ten it continually during the whole year. The theme — or 
rather the indictment — was continued until his death; 
and during that period Burke was not much less than a 
monomaniac. It was all to his credit that he took it so 
seriously, for until Burke wrote not many had realized 
its importance. The great Pitt scarcely seemed to regard 
it as practical politics. He thought it so insignificant that 
he began to plan a war in the East against Russia. Those 
Englishmen who were watching events were mostly gen- 
erous enough to hope that the French would succeed in 
ridding themselves of a hopelessly indolent and inefficient 
government; and they had a less conscious hope that 
perhaps the example might help in ridding England of 
some of its ruling corruption and stupidity also. 

But before anyone could quite determine what would 
happen, or what should be done, Burke began to rush 
wildly about shouting "Fire ! fire !" at the top of his voice. 
He refused to support Fox's Bill to repeal the Test and 
Corporation Acts, seeming to imagine that this was the 
first step toward the fall of the Tower of London. The 
general opinion was that he was making himself absurd. 
But the publication of the Reflections changed the public 
mind to the extent that the propertied classes took panic. 
It was not only in England; throughout Europe Burke's 
book went like a torch of summons to the war against 
France. It is even a question whether, had it not been 
for this book, France might not have settled her troubles 
before Europe intervened. It was the threat of foreign 
invasion that gave the political adventurers of France 
their excuse for the Terror, and all that followed it. If 



EDMUND BURKE 179 

Burke was the cause of the coalition against France, then 
he caused the Terror also. 

Was Burke right or wrong in his conception of the 
French Revolution? It is fair to describe his attempt to 
crush it as the chief endeavour of his famous career. 
Did that attempt prove him to be a wise man or a foolish 
one, or merely one of those ordinary middling men who 
are half right and half wrong, who have (being only 
middling) certainly no title to great fame, whether for 
wisdom or folly? In a hundred smaller points of detail 
Burke was quite right concerning the affairs of France. 
On the final question, that summed all these up into a 
great whole, as the most sensational event in history, 
Burke was utterly and profoundly wrong. His argu- 
ments would have seemed conclusive in a police court. 
He could have easily secured convictions or committals 
against thousands of these revolutionaries — for assault, 
incitement to riot, murder, sacrilege, blasphemy, and 
most of the offences contained in the criminal code. 
Tested by the standards of the law-courts of Europe, 
Burke had a reasonable case for his amiable hope that 
the French Revolution would be hanged, drawn and 
quartered. No one must blame Burke for using heated 
language when he wrote on this subject; for no one should 
think that this earthquake of a great nation can be dis- 
cussed and valued in the quiet language current between 
bishops and their butlers. 

But, tested by the standards of philosophy and meas- 
ured by the rods of universal history, Burke's criticism 
of the Revolution was little but the ravings of a sick man 
in delirium. His argument had the intellectual content 



180 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

of a street brawl. His treatment of the great event 
showed that he never saw it as a whole, and further, 
had he seen that whole, it is clear that his historical 
knowledge was too slight in texture to give his criticism 
any value. Sentence after sentence in his Reflections on 
the Revolution in France, and also in his later writings, 
can be isolated as gems of wisdom in detail; but all 
gathered together it is evident that here if ever was a 
case of a man who could not see the wood because of 
the trees. When he said in 1790 that if the Revolution 
continued as it had begun it would soon be in the hands 
of a scum of self-seeking adventurers, he was not so far 
from the truth. His words are one of the great prophe- 
cies of history: "If this monster of a Constitution can 
continue, France will be wholly governed by the agitators 
in corporations, by societies in the towns formed of 
directors of assignats, and trustees for the sale of Church 
lands, attorneys, agents, money-jobbers, speculators and 
adventurers, composing an ignoble oligarchy, founded 
on the destruction of the Crown, the Church, the nobility 
and the people. Here end all the deceitful dreams and 
visions of the equality and rights of men. In the 'Serbo- 
nian bog' of this base oligarchy they are all absorbed, 
sunk and lost forever." The prophecy became a fact. 

It is useless denying that the greater part of the men 
and women who led the French Revolution — as in the 
case of most revolutions — were distinctly objectionable 
people with whom one would not have cared to share 
one's dinner table. Some of them were more or less 
mad, some were dishonest self-seekers, some thoroughly 
vicious, and the rest of them were entirely sincere or 
still more entirely stupid. Of course Burke was right 



EDMUND BURKE 181 

when he maintained that it is impossible to proceed by 
way of violent change. As he wrote to Elliot in 1795: 
"I wished to warn the people against the greatest of all 
evils — a blind and furious spirit of innovation under the 
name of reform"; but when he added as the next sen- 
tence, "I was indeed well aware that power rarely re- 
forms itself," he clearly did not see whither this latter 
remark would lead him; for it cut the ground from under 
so much of his criticism of the revolutionaries. It is 
indeed impossible to reform a nation by standing it on its 
head, as those sincerely stupid people tried to do in 
France. Burke made legitimate fun of that vain hope 
that it would save France if it were cut up into artificial 
departments with new communes and new cantons — "this 
new pavement of square within square, and this organiza- 
tion, and semiorganization, made on the system of Em- 
pedocles and Buffon, and not upon any politic principle." 
This critic was right when he protested that society is a 
living organization and cannot be played with at the re- 
former's will. We realize now better than in Burke's 
time that the units of the body social cannot be shuffled 
and dealt around as a card-player deals his pack; and 
all honour to Burke for grasping that vital fact so soon. 
Again, Burke had a sound argument in his mind when 
he asked whether a community of "lazy" monks was the 
worst thing that could happen to society, even if they 
only sang all day in their choir. For, said he, "they are 
as usefully employed as if they worked from dawn to 
dark in the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly, 
unmanly, and often most unwholesome and pestiferous 
occupations, to which by the social economy so many 
poor wretches are inevitably doomed. If it were not so 



1 82 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

generally pernicious to disturb the natural course of 
things ... I should be infinitely more inclined forcibly 
to rescue them from their miserable industry, than vio- 
lently to disturb the tranquil repose of monastic quie- 
tude." Of course, Burke had too deep a respect for 
property to write thus of labour in real seriousness; and 
his desire to save the French Church was based on his 
conviction that if the Church and religion broke down, 
then his beloved property would be submerged in the 
deluge that would flow through the breach in the social 
ramparts. Still, as a point against the blind stupidity of 
the French revolutionists it was a neat debating score. 

So, in one small point after another, and, as we have 
seen, even in important matters, Burke had good grounds 
for his case against the Revolution. But when his argu- 
ments are set out in their proper proportion against the 
background of the whole social and political condition of 
France, then his case becomes little more than the size 
of the fly on the wheel. He was held by his contempo- 
raries, and is still considered in the history-books, as a 
man with a philosophical, a political and historical mind. 
He clearly himself believed that he had all these qualities. 
It is the more astounding, therefore, to find him as hope- 
lessly dazed by this great convulsion in France as a coun- 
try cousin is confused by the number of platforms at 
Waterloo Station. He so completely lost his head that 
he mistook the opinions and acts of a few dozen men and 
women in Paris for the thoughts and deeds of the French 
nation. "The Revolutionary harpies of France," he 
shrieked, "sprung from night and hell, or from that cha- 
otic anarchy which generates equivocally 'all monstrous, 
all prodigious things,' cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their 



EDMUND BURKE 183 

eggs . . . leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or 
unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal." This 
panic-stricken Irishman, who was reputed, and believed 
himself, to be a philosopher, turned out to be so dull- 
witted and badly informed that he mistook a clique of 
adventurers and army contractors for the French race. 

Burke never realized that the French were the most 
cultured people in Europe. He had himself been re- 
ceived as an honoured guest in the salons of Paris, but 
it is clear that this visitor from duller London, bred as 
he had been in a Quaker school, was altogether ill at ease 
in a society that recklessly and charmingly dared to dis- 
cuss whatever subject came within its view. The sight 
and sound of a governing class with brilliant wit and fine 
manners rasped on his prim soul, and he went back to 
England to declare: "I see some of the props of good 
government already begin to fail." The whole incident 
goes to prove that France then, as now, stood at the 
highest point of world culture. Was Burke, then, such a 
hopeless ignoramus that he could measure this nation 
by the deeds of a few cut-throats and fanatics in Paris? 
Frankly, Burke was of such a nervously emotional nature 
that he was capable of even that. Take the case of his 
passing glance at Marie-Antoinette when he went to Ver- 
sailles during his visit of 1773. It is possible that he 
might have altogether changed his opinion of the French 
Revolution had it not been for the memory of that lady's 
face. It would be unkind to quote once more that famous 
paragraph in the Reflections where he recalls his emo- 
tions at that sight. This mature statesman and writer 
has the calm assurance to tell his readers that the history 
of France should be decided by the appeal of that pretty 



184 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

face. "I thought ten thousand swords must have leapt 
from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threat- 
ened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone." 

That is Burke all over. When he should have been 
discussing the social conditions of France, he was dream- 
ing of a pretty woman, "glittering like the morning star, 
full of life and splendour and joy. Oh, what a revolu- 
tion! and what a heart must I have to contemplate with- 
out emotion that elevation and that fall!" Remember, 
he was deadly in earnest, for it happened that this passage 
formed part of some proof-sheets that he sent to Sir 
Philip Francis for his approval; and Burke was indignant 
when his friend promptly replied that all this about the 
French Queen was "pure foppery." Burke's answer was 
that he wept when he wrote the passage, and wept again 
when he reread it. It is true that there may be few 
things so worth weeping for as a pretty face; but one 
must really distinguish between melodrama and sociology. 
Had this lady been the most virtuous, the most beautiful 
and the wisest in France, she would have weighed not a 
grain in a philosopher's estimate of the national problem. 
As a matter of fact, Marie-Antoinette was very far from 
any of these qualities, and if anything could excuse the 
crimes of the revolutionists it was her folly and treachery. 
She was almost the weakest spot in the Royalists' case — 
and Burke thought she was one of its strongest points of 
defence. 

Burke's ignorance of the facts in this matter of the 
Queen is only one instance of his ignorance of the French 
position altogether. Lord Morley writes tersely : "The 
fact is that Burke did not know enough of the subject 
about which he was writing." We might forgive his 



EDMUND BURKE 185 

ignorance of facts, but for a man who professed to be a 
bundle of tender sympathies it is impossible to overlook 
his want of imagination when he was faced by the agony 
of France. He had not enough historical knowledge to 
know how France had been driven desperate by the crush- 
ing of its local liberties under the crude centralization of 
Richelieu and his successors, and by the reckless extrava- 
gance of the Court of the Bourbon Kings. Had they 
been a poor-spirited race — like the Germans or the Eng- 
lish, for example — the French would have borne with 
tyranny meekly. But they rose in anger at last, not be- 
cause they were the most downtrodden, but just because 
they were one of the freest people in Europe. A few 
bad harvests brought the crisis, and the criminal folly 
of the French Court and its Ministers did the rest. Ir- 
resistibly France was swept away by a wave of bold self- 
assertion. If Burke had been a man of wide culture, in- 
stead of little more than a politician's hack-writer, he 
would have understood the courage and righteousness of 
that national assertion. At its heart France was sound. 
But it is a dangerous thing to play with the laws of so- 
ciety, just as Browning has said it is "a dangerous thing 
to play with souls." It quite naturally happened, there- 
fore, that unhappy France, setting out to reform itself, 
found suddenly that events had got beyond control. 
Someone had blundered, or somebody was self-seeking. 
Anyhow, sane possible reforms became insane or impos- 
sible anarchy, and the most brutal became more powerful 
than the wise. 

There was France writhing in the agony of child-bed; 
she was about to give birth to a new epoch. Never had 
conception been more legitimate, for the democracy of 



1 86 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

the most democratic race in Europe and the sensibilities 
of the most refined one had been grossly insulted by a 
callously stupid government. It was indeed time that 
France asserted itself. But the task proved beyond its 
powers for the moment, and the torture of this great peo- 
ple was piteous. At such a moment a statesman would 
have offered constructive advice; a philosopher would 
have shown broad toleration; and a man of feeling would 
have rushed with sympathy. Burke professed to be all 
these. Yet at this supreme crisis in history he can think 
of nothing more helpful than to stand outside the sick- 
room, raving in a manner more like the lady next door 
in hysterics than a philosopher. He tried to incite the 
world to rush in and slaughter the patient. The mere 
rumour, in later days, that Pitt was thinking of making 
peace with the Republic sent Burke into convulsions. One 
Letter on a Regicide Peace followed another; and they 
ceased only because Burke died. He left the world with 
bitter sorrow that the people of France had not been 
dragged through the mud by the Kings of Europe, be- 
cause here was a nation that had vainly attempted to save 
itself from the gross misgovernment of an utterly incom- 
petent Court and its bureaucrats. 

Even on his own lines Burke could have stated such a 
clear case against the revolutionary government. The 
men in possession of power were, many of them, self- 
seeking adventurers — history is one continual proof that 
it generally has been so — but there were as many wise 
and honourable men in France as anywhere in the world. 
Burke was one of the last men who should have needed a 
hint on this matter, for had he not written, "In truth, the 
tribe of vulgar politicians are the lowest of our species"? 



EDMUND BURKE 187 

These tyrants (if such they were) in Paris were exercising 
their tyranny over their own people. Indeed, Burke 
seemed to admit it when he wrote : "The world knows that 
in France there is no public, that the country is composed 
but of two descriptions — audacious tyrants and trembling 
slaves." To call this people servile is a ridiculous per- 
version of the truth, but, accepting his statement, could he 
have more clearly shown how worthy this helpless nation 
was of sympathy? If he had possessed the slightest 
knowledge of current affairs he would have known that it 
was the threat of the Kings and the emigres (Burke's 
dear friends and masters) that turned the young revolu- 
tionary Republic into an aggressive force. France de- 
cided to conquer Europe because she realized that 
Europe intended to conquer her. Of course, there were 
all those adventurers in Paris who egged on the tumult of 
war, because times of chaos and war are most convenient 
for those who are out for plunder. Had it not been for 
the emigres sheltering beyond the Rhine, and the Kings 
who made very clear their intention of making what 
territorial profit they could out of the troubles in France, 
then there would have been little chance for those political 
adventurers to turn a legitimate attempt to win freedom 
into a wild scramble for power. It was the policy of such 
as Burke that made the Terror possible. It was his 
favourite actress, Marie-Antoinette, who drove the 
people mad with the fear of her treachery and revenge. 
It was she who called the Kings of Europe to crush France 
by force of arms. It was her folly that set up the guil- 
lotine; and if ever justice demanded a head, it was fitting 
that hers should fall. 

Burke had lost control of his intellect. France, to him, 



188 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

meant a few score intriguers in Paris; he could not see 
the nation behind them — or, shall we say, under them. 
That was only one side of his monumental blunder. Had 
he called on Europe to crush a nation because it gave sub- 
mission to tyrants, it would have been stupid, it would 
have been heartlessly severe. Nevertheless, there would 
have been some rude sense of justice in it. But Burke had 
another object in view, and it was the full measure of this 
man. He began his wrath against the people of France 
when there was scarce a murmur of desire on their part to 
overthrow the monarchy, still less any suggestion of per- 
sonal punishment. There had certainly been in limited 
parts of France the burning of chateaux; there had been 
many bread riots; and the Bastille had been rushed by a 
mob that had many suspicious symptoms of being organ- 
ized by those adventurers who were already seeking their 
opportunity. But we must assume that Burke was well in- 
formed in public affairs ; he surely had never mistaken the 
Gordon Riots for the voice of England? Did he imagine 
that France, or any other country, was, in those wilder 
days, to reform herself without temporary confusion? 
The question may make us realize the fundamental con- 
viction of Burke's character. He was so satisfied with 
the social order as it already was that he could not con- 
ceive of any radical change being necessary. 

That is the political and economic mind of Edmund 
Burke. He stood for the established order. He was 
the most powerful and most subtle of the defenders of 
the men in possession. He was the advocate of the 
Ruling Class: the chief protector of their property. 
Thus it was that immediately the French Revolution be- 
gan Burke was its opponent : because it dared to ask for 



EDMUND BURKE 189 

change, and began to take for itself what had been re- 
fused to its petition. Burke was the most convinced 
Tory in English history. There are a few sentences 
scattered here and there through his writings that seem 
to scent liberality of thought and welcoming of reform. 
But when analysed they all come to very little on paper; 
and when it came to practice, Burke's own official and 
political career is a proof that they meant even less. 
Whatever reform Burke was prepared to sanction, it 
must not interfere with the supreme power of the prop- 
ertied and governing class. This man, who has 
strangely become known in the schoolbooks as a Liberal 
(in the sense of generous thought), will be found on in- 
spection to have performed much the same function for 
the rich that a stone castle did for the Norman barons. 
It saved their existence. It does not appear that he 
concealed this fact either from himself or from the 
world. When he first wrote on the Revolution it was 
chiefly in the orthodox political phrases — the rights of 
kings and senates, the franchise and the constitution in 
general. But he soon realized what was really at stake. 
In his letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, in 1792, he wrote 
"the great danger of our time, that of setting up number 
against property." Again: "It is one of the excellences 
of our Constitution that all our rights of provincial 
election regard rather property than person." But it 
was in his letter of defence against the attacks of the 
Duke of Bedford (on the matter of Burke's pension) 
that he showed so frankly his hand. He admitted there 
that he knew perfectly well the essential effect of his 
arguments against the revolutionists in France. For he 
told the Duke that "there is one merit of mine which he, 



190 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

of all men living, ought to be the last to call in question. 
I have supported with very great zeal . . . those opinions 
which buoy up the ponderous mass of his nobility, wealth 
and titles. ... I have done all I could to discountenance 
their inquiries into the fortunes of those who hold large 
portions of wealth without any apparent merit of their 
own." Could anything be franker? But evasion was 
impossible; for Burke had been driven by the tumult of 
France to show his hand when perhaps quieter times 
would have permitted him to play his cards in the craftier 
manner of the ordinary politician. 

At all costs Burke was intent on saving the Rich and 
the Governing Classes from attack; and if he had not 
been such an innocent child he would not have been so 
stupid as to give himself away for the sake of scoring a 
few clever points off the Duke of Bedford. This letter 
is a very good example of Burke's weakness and strength. 
It shows the qualities that made this third-rate man one 
of the celebrities of Europe. It is a brilliant letter. It 
certainly caused great fun at all the smart breakfast tables. 
The Duke had suggested that Burke had no right to a 
State pension in his old age; and the answer was as neat 
an example of the "look at your own dirty face" argument 
as a philosopher could be expected to produce. Indeed, 
it is quite delicious. He contrasts his own services to the 
State — which had certainly been prodigious in amount if 
not so monumental in quality — with the services of the 
Duke. Then he gives a short sketch of the manner in 
which that peer's family came into power, built on the 
spoils of the Church at the Reformation: "The grants 
to the House of Russell were so enormous as not only to 
outrage economy, but to stagger credibility. The Duke 



EDMUND BURKE 191 

of Bedford is the leviathan among all the creatures of 
the Crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk; he 
plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty. Huge 
as he is, and whilst 'he lies floating many a rood,' he is 
still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his 
blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a 
torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all 
over with the spray — everything of him and about him 
is from the throne. Is it for him to question the dispensa- 
tion of the royal favour?" One can see in a flash this 
gigantic creature tumbling clumsily in a prehistoric marsh. 
It is a classic of vituperation. 

But observe the extreme danger of the whole argument. 
The more conclusively Burke proved that Bedford did 
not deserve his possessions, the more preposterous was 
the plea that Burke had done his best to save this national 
plunderer from the avenging revolutionists who were 
then rising with intent of rough and ready justice. It 
was only a frank contempt for public sense that could 
have allowed the writer to set up such a perilous defence, 
which could be so easily outflanked; and one scarcely 
knows whether to admire more the insolence of the bluff 
or the dainty skill with which it is carried through. "My 
merits, whatever they are, are original and personal; 
his are derivative. It is his ancestor, the original pen- 
sioner, that has laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit, 
which makes His Grace so very delicate and exceptious 
about the merit of all other grantees of the Crown. 
Had he permitted me to remain in quiet, I should have 
said, 'Tis his estate; that's enough. It is his by law; 
what have I to do with it or its history? He would 
naturally have said on his side, 'Tis this man's fortune, 



192 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

He is as good now as my ancestor was two hundred and 
fifty years ago. I am a young man with very old 
pensions; he is an old man with very young pensions — 
that's all." 

It is all very excellent — on the lines of Mr. Lloyd 
George squabbling (in the old days!) with the peers 
about their Church lands. But does it help to settle 
whether either Burke or Bedford had much claim to his 
pension? There is the suggestion, indeed, that if only 
the Duke had held his tongue, then Burke would have 
held his pen; for did not the angry politician add: "In 
the name of common sense, why should the Duke of 
Bedford think that none but the House of Russell are 
entitled to the favour of the Crown?" Which is very 
true, but it is an answer which would naturally receive 
more attention in Billingsgate than in more scholastic 
circles. It was, nevertheless, just the smart answer which 
made Burke's pen so useful to the political magnates in 
whose service he spent most of his life. He devoted his 
earlier public years to playing the part of general secre- 
tary and friendly adviser to the Whigs. He told them 
what to think; and then he put it into good English 
for them, in case they got muddled in their grammar 
and logic. There is really no knowing what might have 
happened to the bewildered Whig noblemen and country 
gentlemen in those days if it had not been for Burke's 
fatherly care. They might have forgotten all about the 
Revolution of 1688, with its magnificent principles on 
which the whole safety of the nobility and plutocracy de- 
pended. Without Burke to keep them straight in the 
path of self-interest, they might have become reactionary 
and gone back to the healthier traditions of national life, 



EDMUND BURKE 193 

when the welfare of the State was held more sacred than 
the interests of party. Who knows? 

The value of Burke to them was that he did possess 
brains of a sort. However one may disagree with his 
principles and distrust his sincerity, the fact remains that 
it was not safe to get within reach of his tongue or his 
pen unless one was equally heavily armed or at least 
regardless of one's reputation. The governing persons 
of that day, very much like their successors now, were 
by no means a well-educated class as the school board 
inspectors understand the term. Prime Ministers are re- 
ported, on good authority, to have been in the habit of 
giving instructions for the seizure of new colonies before 
they were quite sure where they were on the map. Plenty 
of them were very brilliant men at dinner-parties, and 
even in the Houses of Parliament, if they had but the 
delicate balance between enough wine and not too much 
of it. But few of them had the plodding patience to 
acquire the sort of solid knowledge which Burke placed 
at their disposal. He was the sort of fellow who could 
read a dozen pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica with- 
out having to interrupt his study in order to shoot a par- 
tridge or hunt a fox. He could write long paragraphs 
about finance, without having to inquire, like Lord Ran- 
dolph Churchill, what "the damned dots" meant. He 
could discuss questions of trade and industry. He could 
spin quite long sentences on all manner of subjects with- 
out making himself look foolish, and generally with the 
effect of making his opponents appear entirely ridiculous. 

Beyond his power of detailed knowledge, Burke had a 
still more useful quality in public life. He could write 
or speak a sentence of bounteous gracefulness that made 



i 9 4 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

everybody feel that it was noble and right and beyond 
further argument. At his best he was a real poet and 
artist in words; even at his worst he was a first-class melo- 
dramatist. Of the former rank, there is above all that 
passage in his reply to the Duke of Bedford where he 
writes of the death of his only son. "The storm has gone 
over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks which the 
late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of 
all my honours, I am torn up by the roots, and lie pros- 
trate on the earth. ... I am alone. I have none to 
meet my enemy at the gate. Indeed, my lord, I greatly 
deceive myself if in this hard season I would give a peck 
of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honour 
in the world. ... I live in an inverted order. They who 
ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. They 
who should have been to me as posterity are in the place 
of ancestors." And in the next paragraph there is an 
example of his pungency when he goes on: "The Crown 
has considered me after long service; the Crown has paid 
the Duke of Bedford in advance. He has had a long 
credit for any service which he may perform hereafter." 
It was this extraordinary blending of stately prose with 
something much more like pig-sticking that made Burke 
so conspicuous. He could turn a phrase with the same 
sort of skill that the experienced craftsman can turn a 
table-leg. The subject of colonial policy in America 
brought forth many of the best examples of his art: 
"The question with me is, not whether you have a right 
to render your people miserable; but whether it is not 
your interest to make them happy. It is not what a 
lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, reason and 
justice tell me I ought to do." Then he had a ripe sense 



EDMUND BURKE 195 

of irony: "The temper and character which prevail in 
our colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human 
art. We cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce 
people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from 
a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. 
The language in which they would hear you tell them 
this tale would detect the imposition; your speech would 
betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest person on 
earth to argue another Englishman into slavery." While 
the sentence turning on John Hampden and his twenty- 
shilling shipmoney tax is too hackneyed to quote. 

But perhaps Burke's most fruitful gift from his fairy 
godmother was the capacity to see everything through 
the coloured glass of sentiment. Burke had a good intel- 
lectual foundation of quite solid reason. But the slightest 
whiff of sentiment, and that intellect was shaken to its 
roots, and the man of reason became the sport of the 
most childish emotions. We have seen that the memory 
of Marie-Antoinette's face was enough to overturn any 
historical facts that were in his mind. It is undignified 
to watch this mature statesman writing of the French 
Revolution as though it were a thing of fiction, in the 
telling of which he need not keep to the evidence. For 
his conception of the virtuous monarchy of France was 
scarcely anything but fiction. Poor Louis Seize was not 
far from a simpleton (although an honourable and en- 
tirely well-meaning one) ; Louis XV, before him, had 
been an idle rake; and Louis XIV had tried to make 
democratic Frenchmen believe that their autocratic King 
was God's deputy on earth. It certainly would have been 
much juster if he had been guillotined instead of Louis 
XVI, who had to bear all the pains of his ancestors' mis- 



196 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

deeds. If any one person was responsible for the Revo- 
lution it was that proud, narrow-minded woman, Marie- 
Antoinette, who played the tyrant over her weak husband, 
as Madame Roland bullied hers. The Queen had cour- 
age, but stupid bravery has ruined more nations than it 
has saved. That Burke should have detected any virtues 
in this Queen of France worthy of modifying the national 
demand for reform rules him outside the company of 
rational men. If all the reformers were as bad as he 
painted them — and they almost were — that was no reason 
for dragging Marie-Antoinette into the discussion. A 
philosopher would have dismissed her as nothing but a 
nuisance, in the way of reasonable debate. She was a 
disagreeable fact, it is only too true, but that was no 
reason why Burke should turn her into a superstition. 
There is no denying the truth. Burke could at times be a 
sentimentalist, and sometimes of the most maudlin kind. 
It is kindest to try to believe that his vein of snobbery 
was due to nothing else but his sentimentality, and not 
to a self-seeking desire for patronage. Burke does not 
seem to have been an intriguer for office and wealth; if 
he were so, he was a bad failure. He was utterly dis- 
gusted when he failed to get office in the Cabinet; but 
he certainly does not appear to have taken the steps 
usual in political circles to get such an advancement. He 
was a snob because he sincerely believed in the great and 
rich and powerful. He was intellectually convinced that 
they were entitled to the respect and obedience of those 
below them. 

A rather pitiable example of Burke's respect for rank 
is the letter which he wrote to Catherine of Russia in 
1 79 1, encouraging her to assist the French emigres. It 



EDMUND BURKE 197 

would be hard to put together in so small a space so 
much ignorance of history, perversion of present facts, 
and servility, as Burke has got into this short note. "The 
debt which your Imperial Majesty's august predecessors 
have contracted to the ancient manners of Europe, by 
means of which they civilized a vast empire," has its 
humorous side when one remembers the number of heads 
Peter the Great had to strike off before he could bully 
Russia into accepting Western civilization of the type of 
Louis XIV and its centralized autocracy. He congrat- 
ulates the Empress that "your sagacity has made you 
perceive that in the case of the Sovereign of France the 
cause of all sovereigns is tried; that in the case of its 
Church the cause of all Churches; and that in the case 
of its nobility is tried the cause of all the respectable 
orders of all society and even of society itself." 

In that one sentence one can see all Burke's innate 
contempt for the lower orders as part of the governing 
machinery of a State. That one should believe that only 
an aristocracy of brains should govern is an arguable 
conception, even if wrong; and the purest lovers of popu- 
lar freedom sometimes have made out a good case for 
a hereditary ruling caste. But in Burke's case it went 
much further than that. Again and again hasty con- 
tempt for the poor and lowly thrusts itself into his writ- 
ings. For example, when he discusses the new French 
Assembly, he sizzles with indignation that humble coun- 
try priests should go to Paris and sit beside noble-born 
bishops in the States-General of their land. What, he 
asks, do little traders know of governing? Had he 
really been the impartial scientific statesman he professed 
to be, he would have asked if they could possibly know 



198 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

less than the muddle-headed rulers of France who had 
so obviously and utterly broken down in their attempts 
to govern. He is horrified by the thought of more 
humane life in the army: "The soldier is told he is a 
citizen, and has the rights of man and citizen." Burke 
obviously could not conceive of anyone obeying orders 
unless he was coerced. If ever there were a narrow class 
philosopher it was Burke. 

His flowing talk of liberty in his earlier days probably 
only convinced himself and the other sentimentalists, But 
he never meant his talk to be taken too seriously. The 
idea was to be strictly construed with the terms of the 
legal documents which were drafted by the Whig victors 
who won when William of Orange was accepted as King. 
It is strange that Burke, who professed such admiration 
for the constitutional settlement of 1688, should have 
got into such a condition of nerves when the French pro- 
posed to define their constitutional rights also. But a 
liberty which was based on sentiment was naturally only 
a thing for this philosopher's theoretical hours. "Grand, 
swelling sentiments of liberty I am sure I do not despise. 
They warm the heart; they enlarge and liberate our 
minds ;, they animate our courage in a time of conflict. 
. . . Every politician ought to sacrifice to the graces, 
and to join compliance to reason." The whole paragraph 
is charmingly self-revealing. Burke classes all this talk 
of liberty with liqueurs and tonics. It was a mere adorn- 
ment to political life in its frivolous moments. Burke 
only praised liberty on paper; at the first appearance of 
it in practical life he fled like a terrified school-child. 
He was like those men who call for war to the death — 
from the safe spots a hundred miles behind the front li»« 



EDMUND BURKE 199 

— and are very indignant when asked to get a little nearer 
the danger zone of active affairs. 

Burke was quite pleased with that somewhat stately 
aspect of human society which is called, a little vaguely, 
political liberty. It looked very well when drafted in 
dignified English and inserted in Petitions of Right and 
such documents. It made a basis for most moving 
speeches in Parliament. But its greatest advantage was 
that it was fairly easily evaded in practice. It was a 
splendid thing to talk about, and it did not much disturb 
everyday life. It was, in fact, the politicians' ideal. 
They had got it from the philosophers, who really meant 
it seriously; but it was the politicians' business to see that 
such admirable theories did not become habits. Burke 
did this work more successfully than most men who have 
gone into political life. His evasive touch was more 
subtle, which may have been because he was to a large 
extent unconscious of what he was doing. Half his life 
Burke was a dreamer filled with his emotions. At least, 
that is the kindest way of judging him. 

It is a little difficult to know how he ever got a reputa- 
tion for being particularly attached to the principles of 
popular freedom, when all the time he was so obviously 
a sound defender of all the principles of privilege. Per- 
haps it was his treatment of the question of the American 
Colonies that gained him this halo of liberalism. But 
when analysed, it was one of his most energetic defences 
of the desires of the rich, although he seems to have 
spoken and acted in all innocent sincerity. For hard logic 
and artistic skill combined it would be hard to beat his 
speeches on the Colonies. He had not many men against 
him who were capable of defending themselves with much 



aoo MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

intellect; but Burke left their weak case in ruins. But if 
we want to know why he put so much energy into it, and 
what was the key to all his arguments, it will be found 
(one cannot help thinking) not in his classic sentences on 
Hampden and the glories of English freedom, but rather 
in a quiet statement of fact that appears in his speech of 
April 1774. "Lord Rockingham very early in that sum- 
mer (1765) received a strong representation from many 
weighty English merchants and manufacturers, from 
governors of provinces and commanders of men-of-war, 
against almost the whole of the American commercial 
regulations, and particularly with regard to the total ruin 
which was threatened to the Spanish trade." 

That was the real heart of the Opposition's fight for 
American liberty. The oppression of the colonists was 
ruining English trade. It was very clever of Burke to 
talk about Hampden and the glorious Constitution. That 
was what he was there to do; the nobles and gentlemen 
who governed the British Empire had not the education 
which led them to think of such neat arguments, whereas 
it was the literary gentleman's profession. And very 
admirably he did his work; indeed, he had an excellent 
case, of which the purest-souled philosopher need not 
have been ashamed. We lost America by childish blun- 
dering that even politicians have scarcely ever surpassed. 
There was nothing heroic about the colonists; there was 
more of sordid economy than of love of liberty in their 
attitude : they wanted England to defend their interests 
without themselves having to pay the cost — at least that 
was a substantial part of the quarrel. Anybody but a 
Grenville and his friends could have made an amicable 
settlement; but if we will be governed by stupid persons 



EDMUND BURKE 201 

we must lose all kinds of national advantages, as well 
as America. If even the City merchants were anxious to 
come to terms with the Americans then there was no need 
to fight — for the City has almost always been the only 
element that desires to fight anybody. 

The case against a war with America was that it would 
seriously damage our trade. As Burke said in his speech : 
'The whole trading interest of this Empire crammed into 
your lobbies, with a trembling and anxious expectation, 
waiting, almost to a winter's return of light, their fate 
from your resolutions. When at length you had deter- 
mined in their favour [by repealing the Stamp Act] . . . 
there arose an involuntary burst of gratitude and trans- 
port." Burke, when he stood foi American freedom, 
was thus, on his own showing, acting on the advice (shall 
we say, the instructions?) of the merchants of England. 
It was a group of Imperialists and theorists who pushed 
their country into this calamitous war : the kind of people 
who to-day would bring the Empire to ruin for the sake 
of an "all red" map. 

Burke was quite candid about his position. As we 
have just seen, he revealed the old story of that deputa- 
tion to Lord Rockingham, and in another sentence repu- 
diated any theoretical views. "I am not here going into 
the distinctions of rights, not attempting to mark their 
boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical dis- 
tinctions; I hate the very sound of them. Leave the 
Americans as they anciently stood, and these distinctions, 
born of an unhappy contest, will die along with it." One 
is inclined to believe that this passage reveals more of 
Burke's mind than many remarks which have received 
more attention. He has so persistently been discussed as 



202 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

a man who dealt in high theories and great principles, as 
a delighter in the abstract. Nothing could be further 
from the truth. Burke was at heart a materialist, like 
most sentimentalists. He was so vague in his principles 
that he was glad to cling to any material facts that came 
within his reach as he was being swept down the river of 
his emotions. Whatever his reasons, Burke was more 
matter-of-fact a politician than most of those who have 
got the credit of lofty thinking. 

The Bristol electors knew their man when they chose 
him to represent that great centre of eighteenth-century 
trade. They quarrelled with him because he knew so 
much more about trading affairs than they did them- 
selves that he wanted to increase Bristol's prosperity by 
promoting freer trade with Ireland. This obviously 
rational thing (for their own interests) was beyond the 
brain-power of the Bristol merchants. So Burke had to 
surrender his parliamentary seat for this commercial city. 
The matter of trade was always one of Burke's main 
interests. It was his grasp of finance and commerce that 
gave him such an easy superiority in the debates on the 
American Colonies. His first important political pam- 
phlet, Observations on the Present State of the Nation 
(1769), was mainly about finance and trade. It was the 
heyday of youthful British Imperialism; and it would 
have been as hard for a man without imperialist views 
to attain a position in the House of Parliament of that 
time as it would be hard for a fish to live on dry land. 
Imperialism was the atmosphere of governing England 
at that moment. Burke, for all his lofty talk about prin- 
ciples, was probably more concerned about the prosperity 
of trade than most of his contemporaries of the ruling 



EDMUND BURKE 203 

set. Being a good deal of a snob, he had much to say 
about the "nobility and gentry," but he seems to have 
realized that manufacture and commerce were rising to 
the first place, though there are many indications that he 
did not relish the change. 

Although he might talk and write in terms of general 
principles, yet in reality Burke mainly thought in terms 
of something much more tangible. The American War 
was to him objectionable because it was ruining trade. 
When he saw it at the first glance, he was quite ready 
to discuss the French Revolution as it concerned the beau- 
tiful and romantic Marie-Antoinette; but that was only 
in the first flush of his emotion. Later on, when he had 
time to think it over more calmly, he wrote in the fourth 
Letter on a Regicide Peace, in 1797 : "The present war 
is above all others (of which we have heard or read) a 
war against landed property." This materialist philoso- 
pher could imagine nothing more terrible happening to 
an individual or to a class than the loss of his wealth, 
for he largely judged men by the measure of their riches. 
When it fitted into his argument, he could be as coldly 
and critically matter-of-fact as any bank manager, and 
could define his terms so that they were reduced to the 
simplest elements. Thus, when he had to prove that 
England was as prosperous as France, he showed that 
this was mainly a question of where living was the 
cheaper; but even that simplification is not clear enough 
for Burke's mind, and he continues the argument: "It 
will be hard to prove that a French artificer is better fed, 
clothed, lodged, and warmed than one in England, for 
that is the sense, and the only sense, of living cheaper." 
That is a preciseness of language highly commendable in 



204 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

a writer of economics, and, if Burke had kept at that 
level, he would — not have been Burke. 

For no sooner does one feel convinced by innumerable 
proofs from his writings and his life that Burke was a 
cool-headed thinker, than one is faced with equally con- 
vincing evidence proving the contrary, it would seem. 
For instance, when he wants to prove that the English 
Constitution does not admit of any tampering with the 
dynasty, he wrote: "The succession of the Crown has 
always been what it now is — an hereditary succession by 
law: in the old line it was a succession by the common 
law; in the new, by the statute law." Now, that would 
be quite a good statement if it were not that there are so 
many leading cases on this subject in English history to 
prove Burke utterly wrong; there were Canute, William 
the Conqueror, Henry IV, Edward IV, Henry VII, and, 
lastly, one which Burke at least might have remembered 
when he wrote, the case of William III. His whole 
argument on this point was that of a third-rate counsel 
with a bad case : he tried to bluff the bench and the jury 
into believing that Englishmen had never broken the rule 
of hereditary succession to the Crown. 

A still more astounding case of misjudgment of facts 
that should have been perfectly clear to Burke is when 
he writes of the condition of European civilization at the 
outbreak of the revolutionary epoch: "In the long series 
of ages which have furnished the matter of history, never 
was so beautiful and august a spectacle presented to the 
moral eye as Europe afforded the day before the Revolu- 
tion in France." A man whose "moral eye" could be 
soothed by the cynicism and international outrages of 
Frederick the Great and Catherine of Russia, who could 



EDMUND BURKE 205 

apply adjectives like "beautiful" and "august" to the 
reckless selfishness of a Louis XV, can scarcely come un- 
der the description of a precise thinker. With such a 
system immediately behind him, Burke goes on "to warn 
the people against the greatest of all evils, a blind and 
furious spirit of innovation under the name of religion." 
He was entitled to say, and indeed he was right in saying, 
that blind innovation was a folly and worse than a folly, 
but no sane man could have said that reform of such a 
system was "the greatest of all evils." Such a sentence 
could only put everything out of perspective. He was 
still more preposterous when he continued, offering the 
example of the British Constitution to the French as a 
way out of their anarchy. He wrote that the House of 
Commons, "without shutting its doors to any merit in 
any class, is, by the sure operation of adequate causes, 
filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in 
hereditary and acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in 
military, civil, naval and political distinction." A man 
who could write such a sentence would be a splendid 
reporter for a fashionable wedding, and he would have 
many of the qualities which go to make an agreeable 
Bond Street hairdresser; but as a judicial statement of 
the real merits of the English House of Commons it has 
insuperable defects. 

With such violent contrasts of character before us 
when we consider Burke as a whole, it is very hard to 
believe that he was always quite straightforward. If he 
had sound brains (and so much of his work is so clever 
that it is hard to think otherwise), could he have made 
such astounding errors in fact without knowing what he 
was doing? With all his knowledge of the world and its 



206 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

history, did he really believe himself justified in per- 
suading his readers that prerevolutionary Europe was a 
triumph of morality, and that the British House of Com- 
mons contained the pick of the wisdom of his country? 
One is tempted to reply shortly that Burke must have 
been a deliberate humbug. And yet there was a good 
deal more of the child about him than the knave. In his 
earlier days he wrote : "I am not one of those who think 
that the people are never in the wrong. . . . But I do 
say that in all disputes between them and their rulers 
the presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the 
people." And if anyone handed him that sentence (and 
many did) in later days, when he had spent the rest of his 
life in denying its truth, he would not have seen the joke; 
he would have been unconscious of anything absurd in his 
logical behaviour or his consistence of thought. 

Burke had one of those disorderly minds that may 
produce a reasonable thought or a wrong one. He had a 
large brain, but it never seems to have reduced its parts 
to obedience. It was never certain what would happen 
therein, and what would come thereout. Perhaps it was 
that he never grasped one or two fundamental truths 
about the universe, so that everything floated aimlessly 
around him. Or perhaps it was what one might call a 
want of moral conviction. He went through life as a 
homeless tramp. He started with the foundations of a 
fine intellect; but for some reason he took to loose intel- 
lectual living, and finished up as one who had become not 
very far from a degenerate. When he died he was living 
in a world of his own emotions, and they were only very 
remotely related to the facts of the world. He had be- 
come a kind of auto-cannibal — living on his own thoughts. 



EDMUND BURKE 207 

He became entirely subjective, and spun his opinions not 
out of the experience of external things as they were 
really happening around him, but out of those internal 
imaginations which he began to mistake for the outer 
world. He built, at last, one or two fixed principles, with 
which this aimless wanderer tried to find a little peace in 
his old age; but they were principles which had so little 
to do with real life that they were poor anchorage for a 
human soul. 

The great tragedy was the French Revolution. With 
an idee fixe that property and rank were the only certain 
factors of the social system, one can imagine Burke's hor- 
ror at the events in France. A man who had dismissed 
most of the essentials of humanity and put them outside 
his conception of society — for this was what Burke had 
necessarily done when he made such as Marie-Antoinette 
the central figure of his social picture — inevitably could 
see nothing but anarchy in the great Revolution. In quite 
an unattached manner one has recently happened upon a 
character which seems very helpful in the analysis of 
Edmund Burke. Marie Bolshkaseva was one of the 
women who enlisted in the Battalion of Death in the Rus- 
sian Army during the late war. She has written her 
reminiscences, in which appears the following passage : 
"I came across a couple hiding behind a trunk of a tree. 
One of the pair was a girl belonging to the Battalion and 
the other a soldier. They were making love ! . . . I was 
almost out of my senses. My mind failed to grasp that 
such a thing could be really happening at the moment 
when we were trapped like rats at the enemy's mercy. 
My heart turned into a raging cauldron. In an instant 
I flung myself upon the couple. I ran my bayonet through 



208 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

the girl. The man took to his heels before I could strike 
him." 

That was almost precisely Burke's mental condition 
when he discovered the French Revolution — though it 
was not hiding behind a tree. One can imagine this 
hysterical woman in cold blood killing the girl in an 
attempt to maintain discipline in a moment of peril. But 
that her heart should become a "raging cauldron" at the 
sight of a human passion which is even more primitive 
than the lust for war, is surely sufficient to put Marie 
Bolshkaseva out of sane society. And in just the same 
way Burke became a cauldron when he was faced by the 
great elementary passions of the French Revolution. Be- 
cause Marie-Antoinette had an attractive manner and 
Robespierre and Marat were unbalanced fanatics — like 
himself — and a few dozen others were scoundrels, he 
forgot that ninety-nine out of every hundred French men 
and women were normal human beings, who were living 
under conditions when every human instinct was exagger- 
ated to the highest degree. Burke could only run his 
bayonet through a healthy nation that had lost its pres- 
ence of mind in a moment of excitement. Like Marie 
Bolshkaseva, he had lost his sense of proportion in human 
affairs, and could only meet panic by hysteria. Spurred 
on by Burke's own cries of alarm, the Kings of Europe 
advanced to attack France, which was in imminent dan- 
ger; and when the people of France, in the terror of 
self-defence, became primitive in their passions, Burke 
lost his intellectual balance and could not distinguish the 
permanent from the trivial. 

Burke was a hopeless failure. He wrote as if he had 
the intention to reform the British Constitution, and he 



EDMUND BURKE 209 

did nothing more than abolish a few superfluous offices 
round the Court. He tried to save the American Col- 
onies from disruption from the Motherland, and the 
argument degenerated into an unsuccessful attempt to 
save the credit of a few London merchants who could not 
collect their colonial debts. He imagined that he had a 
gospel of liberty to preach to the British people; but it 
turned out that it was only a pompous sermon on the 
ideals of the political adventurers of 1688. He began 
with much talk of Freedom, and he ended by being the 
mouthpiece of every tyrannical instrument in Europe. 
He began with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and it 
appeared that his ideal was the figure of a narrow-minded 
Queen and the symbols of a narrow social caste. Burke 
began as a philosopher, and he finished as something not 
very far from a snob. He was honest and less self- 
seeking than is usual amongst ambitious men; but his life- 
work was wrecked because his intellect was always at 
the mercy of his emotions. 



CHAPTER VI 

BENJAMIN DISRAELI, EARL OF BEACONSFIELD 
( I 804-1881) 

IT was perhaps inevitable that, sooner or later, Eng- 
land should be ruled by an alien, who was not even 
a European, but an Oriental of the race of the Jews. 
It was by no means inevitable — but merely our happy 
fate — that this foreign conqueror should also be a poet 
and a dreamer, a historian and a gentleman. As Sidney 
Smith said, "We owe much to the Jews"; and among 
our many debts is that they have given us one of the few 
charming modern statesmen. Disraeli is interesting quite 
beyond the scope of the scientific historical student; he is 
not such as the Pitts and the Foxes, and their kindred, 
whom we must endure (if we are sociologically minded) 
because they have intruded so obtrusively into English 
history. The Earl of Beaconsfield would have been 
charming if he had never appeared on a page of our 
national records; when he does appear thereon, he is as 
a fine jewel on the dust-heap of our political life. 

It is almost an established rule of history that a race 
is rarely governed by one of its own blood. Certainly in 
this country the alien has been the rule and not the excep- 
tion, if we consider the list of our monarchs. William 
the Conqueror and his sons were Norman dukes; the 
Plantagenets were French nobles; the Tudors were 

210 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 211 

Welsh, if Tudor Vychan ap Gronw as an ancestor be 
admitted as evidence of race. The Stuarts were Nor- 
mans who had become Scots; and when their national 
taste for continual theological discussion at last led to 
their final expulsion, they were succeeded by a Dutchman, 
who in turn gave way to the German dynasty from Han- 
over. It is clear that kings, like the prophets, are without 
honour in their own country. But a people rarely has 
much choice in the selecting of its monarch. In the case 
of a prime minister it has generally been held that election 
is more democratic, and there has always been a persistent 
wish on the part of Englishmen that the ministers of 
their foreign kings should be home-bred. Our ancestors 
willingly elected a Dutchman or a Hanoverian for their 
king; they would on no account tolerate their foreign 
friends in the ministry. 

As already said, Disraeli was by blood not even a 
European, but an Asiatic. He was an entire novelty in 
our higher governing circles, a new comet. He was al- 
ready dazzling England when it was still unlawful for a 
Jew to sit in Parliament. It so happened that his father 
had paid more attention to pure literature than to pure 
dogma, so Benjamin his son had grown in a circle that 
was so callous of religious form that this pure Jew was 
baptized as a Christian in his early teens. Nevertheless, 
he was a Jew, notoriously, to all who could read as they 
ran. When Queen Victoria was asked to accept him as 
a Minister of State, it was much like asking a quiet house- 
wife to take a Chinese cook or a Red Indian for a butler. 
The poor Queen was clearly embarrassed; she told Lord 
Derby that she only accepted this strange creature on his 
express guarantee that nothing untoward would occur. 



212 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

When Disraeli, as Leader of the House (which he be- 
came in 1852), fulfilled his official duty of writing to his 
Sovereign the nightly letter on the events of the sitting, 
his mistress was almost puzzled. She wrote to her uncle, 
the King of the Belgians, "Mr. Disraeli (alias Dizzy) 
writes very curious reports to me of the House of Com- 
mons' proceedings." It was as if she had received the 
washing list made out in Chinese. The curiosity grew 
to be one of her most trusted friends. 

There were two Benjamin Disraelis, both charming 
and brilliant men, but clearly distinguishable from each 
other. At a first glance one would go no further than 
placing them in widely separate branches of the same 
family. There was the one who went into politics and 
made such a huge success in the House of Commons. All 
the while he was on the stage of the Commons Europe 
was holding its sides with laughter, and Sir Robert Peel 
wished that he (himself or Disraeli, or both) had never 
been born. This political member of the family was a 
ruthless opponent, and when he got his enemy by the 
neck dealt with him much as a terrier deals with rats. 
He was as clever a man at a party intrigue as could be 
found in Westminster society — so clever, indeed, that it 
was a long time before anyone would entrust their polit- 
ical honour to his keeping; but that was chiefly because 
they were afraid he would behave towards them as they 
would have done to him, if they had the skill. Half his 
life this Disraeli was regarded as something between a 
charlatan and a mountebank; and during the rest of his 
career he was the most trusted friend and servant of our 
primmest Queen, and all Europe was listening for his 
next words of wisdom. 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 213 

Then there was the other man with the same name and 
the same face. This distantly related Disraeli was a 
dreamer, who kept himself to himself because he had the 
timid manners of all people who are of delicate tastes. 
It is said that it was difficult to make this Disraeli talk; 
which was not unnatural, for he lived in a far-away world 
of fancies which could scarcely be translated into words. 
He was a mystic, and regarded ordinary human beings 
as dull utilitarians who bored him when they did not dis- 
gust him. Unlike his political relation, who spent his 
whole life (almost without time to eat or sleep) at the 
Houses of Parliament, this poetical Disraeli was an idler 
and a flirt, who thought there was nothing in the world so 
delightful as a charming woman in her most bewitching 
mood. This mystical creature of imagination, when he 
would condescend to come to earth and treat of mortals, 
liked most of all to land in the romantic East, where 
things do not happen in the humdrum way of Paris and 
London. 

So there are two Benjamin Disraelis: the politician 
who was the greatest success of London and Western 
Europe, and the poet who lived in the East, where the 
family was born. So there must obviously be two bio- 
graphical notices, unless — which seems altogether im- 
probable — it can be shown that the two men are the same. 
By a lengthy process of collating the two different sources 
of evidence (the details of which would unnecessarily 
trouble the reader), this difficult task has been accom- 
plished; and it has been proved for all practical purposes 
that the Disraeli who told the politicians (in his romances 
of Coningsby and Sybil) that they were a set of disreputa- 
ble scoundrels was the same man who in a few years made 



214 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

them choose him as Prime Minister of Great Britain. 
And it is now beyond all reasonable doubt that the man 
who spent his early days in fashionable salons and yellow 
waistcoats was the same person who went into politics 
with the message to the gentlemen of England that unless 
they remembered their duty to the labouring poor of 
their country it would soon go very badly for their gen- 
tlemanly souls and estates. 

At one moment a man of ultra fashion, and the next 
a social revolutionary with a passionate zeal that made 
the ordinary reformer seem an amateur or a faddist. 
Now the most worldly of cynics, the next the most wor- 
shipful and devout of believers — one feels that this is not 
a human mind, but much rather a psychological text-book. 
But the classification will look simpler when we have made 
that great division into the Disraeli who wrote in his 
study and lived in his thoughts, and the Disraeli who 
appeared on the political platform and lived that he 
might do well at Westminster. It would seem to have 
been by a very deliberate choice that he himself made 
this distinction in his life, although to the outside ob- 
server it seems an impossible choice that made a poet 
callously deliver his soul into the keeping of those who 
train politicians. But the accomplished fact faces us 
beyond all argument: Disraeli had the mind of a poet 
and he did become Prime Minister of Great Britain. We 
may find what explanation we please, but the thing itself 
is beyond discussion. 

His wife — by no means the least of the mysteries of 
this mysterious man from the East — once wrote down 
the character of her husband, as they do in confession 
books. She expressed seventeen precise statements 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 215 

about him, of which the first was "Very calm," and the 
last was "His whole soul is devoted to politics and ambi- 
tion," and in the middle of the list we read, "Often says 
what he does not think." It is a masterly little picture 
she gives us, somewhat in the manner of the latest im- 
pressionalists in paint, who pick out essentials and ignore 
the unimportant. The evidence may be prejudiced; but 
for what it is worth we should remember that the wife 
considered her husband "Very patient, very studious, 
very generous." Perhaps, a little further from the pic- 
ture, we can, with these hints, see the whole even better 
than the wife could see it — for it is impossible to reveal 
all to one who lives in the same house; it would be as if 
we lived with the Recording Angel. 

The main factors are fairly clear. Benjamin Disraeli 
found himself living in an alien country, where, rightly or 
wrongly, there was a deep prejudice against his race. Be- 
ing a Jew, he also must have early discovered that he was 
more alert and brilliant than the great mass of his neigh- 
bours. It could not have been very long, indeed, before 
he saw that he was very much more alert and very much 
more brilliant than nine hundred and ninety-nine out of 
every thousand of the men and women he met. Is it sur- 
prising that this young man had great ambitions? It was 
one of those cases where the ambition was almost as great 
as the ability. But if this charming boy had not been am- 
bitious for himself, his women friends would have inter- 
vened on his behalf. All through his life he preached 
(almost with the earnestness of a Nonconformist parson) 
the exhilarating and beneficial influence of women on a 
man's career. Many women intervened in his life — and, 
indeed, there was more than a good excuse for interest- 



216 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

ing oneself in young Disraeli, who did nothing that would 
damp this zeal. Sarcastic observers thought he dressed 
so beautifully to please these ladies, and he certainly 
seemed to have mistaken smoky London for Arcadia, if 
we judge by the rainbow colours of his garments. But 
he gave his lady friends more than a gorgeous cavalier. 
In his diary he wrote when he was sixteen: "Resolu- 
tion — to be always sincere and open with Mrs. E. Never 
to say but what I mean — point de moquerie, in which she 
thinks I excel." If this unknown lady's ghost can still 
take satisfaction in its past, she will have known long ere 
this that she probably had more influence over this man's 
life than Bolingbroke and Sir Robert Peel, who by chance 
have more attracted the attention of the stately his- 
torians. Then there was the other woman who "said 
to me one day, and before I had shown any indication 
of my waywardness, 'You have too much genius for 
Frederick Place [the great solicitor's office in which he 
was apprenticed] : it will never do.' We were good 
friends. She married a Devonshire gentleman and was 
the mother of two general officers," was the boy's rem- 
iniscence when he was over seventy and an earl. 

By the time he was twenty the frivolity of so much 
feminine society and so many flirtations had so steadied 
his career that Mr. John Murray could write in 1825: 
"He is a good scholar, hard student, a deep thinker, of 
great energy, equal perseverance, and indefatigable ap- 
plication, and a complete man of business. His knowl- 
edge of human nature and the practical tendency of mind 
and heart are as pure as when they were first formed 
... as playful as a child." It was not a bad result for 
a few years' dainty flirtations; his lady friends had put 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 217 

him on the road of one of the most original and most 
useful careers in English history — whereas he might 
have been driven by an unkind fate to a university and 
the society of tutors who were more fit to train bishops 
and members for the best London clubs. The garrison 
officers at Malta, which he visited in 1830, called Disraeli 
"that damned bumptious Jew boy"; but then most of 
them had been to the public schools and had a natural 
dread of imagination and a quick wit, and the still 
quicker tongue of a man who thus described himself in 
his Diary of 1833: "My mind is continental. It is a 
revolutionary mind. . . . Poetry is the safety-valve of 
my passions, but I wish to act what I write." 

A man who was seeking a great career at the time 
when the Reform Bill of 1832 shook England was more 
likely than not to turn to politics, as a youth of Eliza- 
beth's England turned to play-writing with Shakespeare 
or to seafaring with Drake, while the boys of the Tudors 
dreamed of Court offices and ecclesiastical lands, and 
Chatham's contemporaries set out to plunder India. But 
the Reform Bill set a new fashion in life adventures — the 
mode became political. Disraeli was clearly made for 
the part, if he could sink his better nature and decide to 
play the game. The men already in it had discovered the 
new adventurer; and one day Lord John Russell, no less, 
"fished as to whether I should support them. I answered, 
'They had one claim upon my support; they needed it,' 
and no more." In 1832 he wrote: "I sat between Peel 
and Herries. . . . Peel was very gracious. ... I re- 
minded him by my dignified familiarity both that he was 
an ex-Minister and I a present Radical." 

He called himself a Radical, but his friends must have 



218 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

been a little puzzled by his speeches. When he went 
down to his first election campaign he wrote : "I start on 
the high Radical interest, and take down strong recom- 
mendatory epistles from O'Connell, Hume, Burdett, and 
hoc genus. Toryism is worn out, and I cannot conde- 
scend to be a Whig." He was clearly uncertain himself 
what he was, as the party whips classify politicians. Dur- 
ing his election he announced that he was independent of 
both parties; he added that he was sprung from the 
people, and it was only when he was chosen by the de- 
mocracy that the Tories tried to claim him as their 
candidate. He soon undeceived both parties. "The 
nearest thing to a Tory in disgrace is a Whig in office," 
he slashed out with his right; and then came a blow with 
his left: "The Whigs have opposed me, not I them, and 
they shall repent it." They did, not at that election, but 
for the rest of his life. Within a few months he was 
fighting again, and here his creed was becoming clearer : 
"I shall withhold my support from every Ministry which 
will not originate some great measure to ameliorate the 
condition of the lower orders." He went on to attack 
that "incapable faction who, having knavishly obtained 
power by false pretences, sillily suppose that they will be 
permitted to retain it by half-measures. . . . Rid your- 
selves of all that political jargon and factious slang of 
Whig and Tory, two names with one meaning, used only 
to delude you. ... I stand here without party. I plead 
the cause of the people, and I care not whose policy I 
arraign." 

But we are now faced by the problem of all political 
careers : Can we believe one word that is said on a 
political platform? If we are to believe Disraeli himself, 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 219 

we most certainly should be sceptical. He was already 
maintaining that the politicians were frauds and hum- 
bugs; and, like the Cretan who said that all Cretans were 
liars, he had shaken the value of his own testimony. It 
is here that the double nature of Disraeli's life becomes 
so useful to inquiring biographers : for he was already 
explaining his opinions elsewhere than on political plat- 
forms. He had already written the Voyage of Captain 
Popanilla in 1827, and, like almost all first books, it con- 
tains most of what its author had to say to the world — 
the rest was mainly a filling out of the details and more 
skilful craftsmanship. It has been already noted that 
Edmund Burke's first book contained a great deal of his 
life-history. In Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845) and 
Tancred (1847) Disraeli has left us a frank political 
creed; indeed, much more, for these three books contain 
a philosophy of life. Cast in the form of romance, there 
is little attempt to conceal that they are a gospel of moral 
and political reform for the English people. In the 
preface to the first of the three, Disraeli says that he has 
only used the method of fiction because it "offered the 
best chance of influencing opinion." The introduction to 
Sybil tells "the subject which these volumes aim to illus- 
trate — the Condition of the People." In other words, 
quite apart from his public career as a politician, running 
side by side with it there is the recorded career of Disraeli 
as a philosopher and economist, as expressed in his long 
series of books. 

It does not need much study of these books to see that 
they are by far the most important part of this states- 
man's gift to his country — it is no exaggeration to say 
that they are a gift to the thought of the world. They 



220 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

are not of merely temporary interest — like the interests 
of most matters that happen in parliamentary circles. 
They discuss ideas which lie beneath all parties and pro- 
grammes, for they deal with the fundamentals of human- 
ity. Indeed, they take particular care to impress on the 
reader that most of the antics of politicians are of the 
most trivial importance and entirely ignore the things 
that matter. Seeing that Disraeli himself went into 
politics and apparently behaved as most other politicians 
behave, it is a rare advantage to be able to check his 
parliamentary career by his written words. There can 
be little hesitation in putting most value, as evidence of 
what Disraeli really believed, on the books. There is, 
first, the obvious fact that public life at Westminster is 
one long series of compromises. It seems the unpleasant 
truth that a man does not accomplish in politics what 
he desires, but only what he can. The history of an 
honest man as an active statesman is not the record of 
his hopes, but of his disappointments. The Houses of 
Parliament are paved with the good intentions of a few 
honest men, and their failures are recorded in the Statute 
Books. There are dozens of passages in Disraeli's works 
which show how clearly he recognized that life is a con- 
tinual compromise. 

There is irresistible evidence all through these books 
that it was in them — not in Parliament — that he said 
what he believed. The sincerity is as clear as any evi- 
dence can be. For there was every reason why Disraeli 
should not have written such books at such a moment if 
he was only another political adventurer, as many said 
he was. Their publication was one of the most astound- 
ingly brave things in English political history. Here was 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 221 

a Jew, consumed with a vast ambition to enter parlia- 
mentary life, who possessed the most limited influence 
except the resources of his own unlimited wits. We know 
from almost every page of his writings that he was con- 
scious that political life was one long intrigue to win the 
help of those in possession, the privileged governing 
classes of blood and wealth. A selfish mean man would 
have done everything at such a moment in his career to 
help people to forget the fact that he was an alien by 
blood, a descendant of a hated religious faith, a lover 
of democracy and of liberty, and a despiser of vulgar 
intrigue. 

What, on the contrary, did Disraeli do? He published 
to the world this trilogy of books, in the first of which 
he told the fine gentlemen who were ruling England that 
they were a set of pompous fools at the best and some- 
thing much more evil at the worst; that they were sur- 
rounded by a crowd of petty intriguers for whom the 
polite dictionaries could supply no appropriate adjective. 
In the second, Sybil, he declared that the boasted wealth 
of England was held by a small class on the top and was 
wrung from the labour of a degraded poor : his text was 
that there were two nations, "The Rich and the Poor," 
and he preached his sermon without much regard for the 
feelings of the former. He said it was impossible to tell 
all the truth about the unutterable misery of the 
poor because "so little do we know of the state of our 
own country that the air of improbability which the whole 
truth would inevitably throw over these pages might 
deter some from their perusal." Then, in the third 
book, Tancred, the author told England that it owed the 
greater part of its faith and its civilization to the Jews, 



222 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

and declared, to a people and an age that worshipped 
materialism, that the spirit was more than matter, and 
that a great emotion was finer than a scientific formula. 

If reckless courage be any test of sincerity, could any- 
thing be more conclusive than Disraeli's action at this 
turning-point in his political career? He flung down the 
glove to everything that seemed established in society. 
He challenged at one moment — for all his ideas can be 
discovered in each of the books, though in each the stress 
is thrown on one particular point — he challenged at once 
Rank, Wealth, Prejudice, just at the moment when he 
was attempting to persuade all those supreme powers to 
make him a member of their governing clique. He cer- 
tainly showed respect to two institutions, the Crown and 
the People ; but they were the weakest forces in the society 
of that day. And adventurers do not generally appeal to 
the weakest. This was clearly his faith and not his 
selfish policy. If we seek the real Disraeli we must go 
first to his books, and only in the second place to his 
political meetings. What he said and did in Parliament 
will be discovered of small importance compared with 
the philosophy and imagination of his books. 

If one can judge of intentions by their effects, the main 
object of Coningsby was to make the governing classes 
ridiculous. Being a man of wit and imagination himself, 
Disraeli would appear to have considered that by brilliant 
analysis and rapier-like passes he could deal a blow to the 
corrupt mass of the governing body. Being an alien, he 
did not realize, perhaps, what a stolid thing is the British 
mind; and at the beginning of his political career he had 
scarcely measured the unweighable mass of the men in 
possession. One can no more demolish the governing 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 223 

class by wit and wisdom than one can clean mud off a cart 
by the breath of one's mouth. If it had been possible, 
there would not have been any rulers left after Disraeli 
had dealt with them; for he annihilated them — they only 
survived by the monotony of habit. 

Coningsby opens with the London clubs in a turmoil 
of excitement over the Reform Bill of 1832. A frantic 
attempt was being made to keep up the farce that the 
politicians and the wirepullers had the welfare of the 
nation at heart, whereas they were mainly concerned 
about the winning of the next vacant office or parliamen- 
tary seat. The Mr. Tapers and the Mr. Tadpoles and 
the worse Mr. Rigbys, who live on the corpse of West- 
minster as lice live on their parent — Disraeli has made 
them classic figures in literature, though it would have 
been better if he had succeeded in making them obsolete 
in real life. They were the toadies who sat round the 
dinner tables of wealthy political peers and haunted the 
boudoirs of Lady St. Julians and Lady X, Y, or Z, who 
took up politics instead of cards or the fine arts. Those 
were the good old days, "when there were only ten men 
in the House of Commons who were not either members 
of Brooks's or this place." They were the days when 
"the twelve-hundred-a-yearers" were the men who took 
politics seriously: "These numerous statesmen who be- 
lieve the country must be saved if they receive twelve 
hundred a year. It is a peculiar class, that; £1,200 per 
annum, paid quarterly, is their idea of political science 
and human nature. To receive £1,200 per annum is 
government; to wish to receive £1,200 per annum is am- 
bition." Their ideal of life was drawing a large salary 
without surrendering the privileges of their class and 



224 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

their patrons. It was a gigantic game of bluffing the 
nation. " 'I am all for a religious cry,' said Taper. 'It 
means nothing, and, if successful, does not interfere with 
business when we are in.' " They did not possess brains, 
except of that peculiarly disagreeable sort that is suc- 
cessful in back-stair intrigue. Mr. Taper's "political 
reading was confined to an intimate acquaintance with 
the Red Book and Beatson's Political Index, which he 
could repeat backwards." Tadpole "was to succeed by 
the aid of the Wesleyans, of which pious body he had 
suddenly become a fervent admirer." While Mr. Rigby 
was "a man who neither felt nor thought, but who pos- 
sessed, in a very remarkable degree, a restless instinct 
for adroit baseness." And Lord Monmouth summed 
them all up in expressing his own great ambitions : "I 
see no means by which I can attain my object but by 
supporting Peel. After all, what is the end of all parties 
and all politics? To gain your object. I want to turn 
our coronet into a ducal one." 

So it goes on. Disraeli holds them up to the public 
gaze, one by one — and most of them were drawn from 
life, remember — and then shakes the sawdust out of 
these dummy figures that pretended they were statesmen. 
This great Reform Bill tumult itself, which set all their 
tongues chattering in Coningsby : " 'It appears to me to 
be in a nutshell,' said Lucian Gay, 'one party wishes to 
keep their old boroughs, and the other to get their new 
peers.' " 

Of course, it has been said that all this is only dainty 
cynicism; that Disraeli had resolved to make his reputa- 
tion by a sharp, bitter tongue ; that we must not take him 
seriously. The accusation is dead against the facts. Dis- 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 225 

raeli was a mass of sympathetic emotions and sentimental 
passions, and not a cynic at all. All his cutting phrases 
about the politicians were not cynicism — they were simple 
truth. It was the politicians who started this rumour of 
cynicism, and have bluffed the public into believing it. 
On the contrary, Disraeli was the victim of every simple- 
hearted, honest creature who strolled across his pages. 
The tenderest lines in Coningsby are for Flora, who was 
too shy to succeed in life except as a gentle-hearted girl 
who was afraid to show her love — not likely to be the 
favourite of the true cynic. Then there are those "two 
young French ladies in their bonnets, whom he soon dis- 
covered to be actresses." They are most illuminating on 
their creator's mind; for they clearly delighted Disraeli 
as much as they did Coningsby, who found them brighten- 
ing the last days of his bored grandfather. "They had 
the finest spirits in the world, imperturbable good temper, 
and an unconscious practical philosophy that defied the 
devil Care and all his work." Lord Monmouth had 
engaged their services because he was weary of orthodox 
society, and asked for "persons who had not been edu- 
cated in the idolatry of Respectability." And he got 
the best value for his expenditure : "Clotilde and Ermen- 
garde had wits as sparkling as their eyes," and how could 
one give higher praise to the latter, "who was so good- 
natured that she sacrificed even her lovers to her friends." 
They were no mean schemers these, trying, like Mr. 
Rigby, to keep all his lordship's money for themselves; 
indeed, they did their best to persuade him to forgive 
Coningsby, which would have saved that young gentle- 
man an odd million or so. One feels certain that these 
are the people that Disraeli really appreciated and en- 



226 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

joyed, as he liked Caroline and Julia, the mill-girls in 
Sybil. No doubt he was stately and courteous to the fine 
society dames when he moved in political circles; but in 
his books they had to listen to many home-truths, and 
found themselves often waiting until their brilliant cre- 
ator had spoken many affectionate phrases with their 
social inferiors. 

What was Disraeli's historical explanation of this crew 
of sham statesmen who were misgoverning and plunder- 
ing England? He said the aristocrats were a collection 
of nobles who had made themselves rich by robbing the 
Church of its lands at the Reformation; who (when they 
were well established in power after an odd hundred 
years' practice under the Tudors and the Stuarts) finally 
took over the power of the Crown itself by the Revolu- 
tion of 1688. Since which time, to the days of Disraeli 
himself, England had been ruled by an oligarchy of 
selfish nobles, who had made the Houses of Parliament 
into instruments of tyranny over the people of England, 
and had ejected the Stuarts mainly because they stood in 
the way of aristocratic despotism over the democracy. 
The struggles of the days of Walpole, Chatham, Bute, 
North and the Younger Pitt had been the clever man- 
oeuvring of the nobles to maintain themselves in power; 
while, according to Disraeli, Bolingbroke and a few 
others had tried to restore the traditions of an earlier 
social system where a stronger Monarchy, with a living 
Church, protected the people from the undue oppression 
of the aristocrats and the plutocrats. Disraeli's charge 
against the oligarchy of the eighteenth century was that 
it was base in origin and base in policy. He said the old 
aristocracy practically disappeared with the Wars of the 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 227 

Roses; that the English peerage of his day was an ille- 
gitimate growth from "three sources: the spoliation of 
the Church; the open and flagrant sale of its honours 
by the elder Stuarts; and the boroughmongering of our 
own times." 

His contempt for this sham nobility was one of the 
passions of Disraeli's life. "I never heard of a peer with 
an ancient lineage. The real old families of this country 
are to be found among the peasantry; the gentry, too, 
may lay some claim to old blood." As for these new 
peers: "They adopted Norman manners while they 
usurped Norman titles. They have neither the right of 
the Norman, nor did they fulfil the duty of the Norman : 
they did not conquer the land, and they do not defend it." 
Some people may think that Disraeli made a great deal 
too much fuss about the aristocrats, legitimate or illegiti- 
mate; but his point of view must be appreciated, for they 
are a fundamental part of his ideal society. When he 
cried down the sham aristocrats, he was not speaking as 
a disciple of the modern democratic theory that the people 
can best govern themselves. He believed no such thing. 
He was convinced that government must come from 
above; and that if the people wanted good government 
they must put the power into the hands of the right gov- 
ernors. He was not a modern European; we must 
remember that he was an Asiatic, to whom modern 
progress was an object of the gravest suspicion. Disraeli 
believed in Race (as he believed in few things else but 
liberty and the good taste that made a man an artist) ; 
and by race he was an Oriental, and therefore conceived 
of society as a body in which the democracy was bal- 
anced with an autocracy, in a manner which is almost 



228 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

inconceivable in modern Europe, but which was an accom- 
plished fact in earlier periods even here. But this raises 
the whole question of Disraeli's conception of our na- 
tional history. It is a most essential part of this man, 
and until it is understood, if not accepted, this statesman 
must be a complete enigma. Being a great man he will 
always — after the fullest explanations — remain a mys- 
tery. 

Disraeli, in his novels, and especially in Coningsby and 
Sybil, has given us an outline of English history. It is a 
little humiliating that we have had to await the arrival 
of an alien from the East to tell us the true history of our 
own race. For that is not far from the truth. The 
sketch of English history thrown off by this novelist in 
the light form of a tale for our leisure moments is per- 
haps the most brilliant, and, better still, the truest analysis 
of the national development in print. Many historians 
have given us more facts; none have drawn such logical 
conclusions from the evidence. There is a strange con- 
fidence in the public mind that, because a man has spent 
a life in examining documents and records, therefore he 
is the best qualified to pass judgment on the evidence 
collected. One might as reasonably expect the young 
ladies who collect the money at tea-shop doors to be the 
safest judges of the best way to invest and administer the 
receipts. The evidence is as urgently necessary as the 
cash if we are to get any satisfactory results; but the 
role of investigator and cashier is not the best qualifica- 
tion for being a philosopher in history or a genius in 
finance. 

It would be ridiculous to claim for Disraeli that he was 
a professional historian; but it would be just as difficult 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 229 

to show that on any important point he was wrong in his 
facts or illogical in his conclusions. He had many ad- 
vantages. He had, first, the supreme advantage of 
starting his study of English history with the blank 
mind of an Oriental, by whom our history had not been 
unconsciously digested as a superstition before it was 
consciously considered as a fact. It is the theory of our 
great jury system that the jurors should know nothing 
of the events until they are told them in court. Regard- 
ing English history, Benjamin Disraeli racially satisfied 
these principles. He came to the study with a clear mind. 
Then, again, he escaped the still more serious limitations 
of an education at a public school and a university. 
These are admirable institutions for turning out men 
of uprightness and gentlemen, but their wildest ad- 
mirers would not claim that they have a standard of 
intellect which is equal to their standard of honour. In 
these institutions it is assumed that certain historical 
dogmas and creeds are beyond discussion; just as the 
clergy start by accepting the XXXIX Articles and the 
Apostles' Creed. Just as the Churchman believes in 
God the Father and his Son, so the Eton master and the 
Oxford don believe in William Pitt and his son, and in 
the dozens of political saints that are adored by the fol- 
lowers of that faith. At Harrow and Cambridge it is 
assumed that English history is the story of a continual 
progress from barbaric Saxons to imperial Britons. It 
begins with a simple-minded Alfred the Great, who, poor 
fellow, did his little best (being without tanks or machine- 
guns or aeroplanes) ; and it has now culminated in a 
glorious apocalypse of an "all red" route round the world 
and an Empire on which the sun never sets. At every 



230 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

British public school, high and low, it is assumed that 
the transition from St. Anselm as the King's adviser to 
Sir Robert Peel as Prime Minister of the Manchester 
School spells Progress and Development. 

Disraeli accepted none of the myths of English his- 
tory. He was an original thinker, and did not copy the 
opinions of his predecessors, as most of the students who 
work at the universities do. Do not let anyone be un- 
grateful for their patient search after the facts, where 
they are invaluable. But when it comes to deduction 
from their facts, it is clear that they are venturing be- 
yond their intellectual depth. Fortunately for Disraeli, 
there seems to have been nothing too deep for him; it is 
one of the advantages of genius. 

He refused to accept the principles of Progress laid 
down in the sixth form at Eton. He clung to the Past 
rather than plunge recklessly into the Future; he had 
just a touch of contempt for Stephen Morley (in Sybil), 
who "wishes to create the future." Disraeli, rightly or 
wrongly, had a profound conviction that it was impossible 
to break with the traditions of the Past; we can only, he 
said, slowly develop them, without any sudden rupture. 
Strangely enough, it is only Eton and Oxford that really 
believe in the ideals of the nouveaux riches. Disraeli 
maintained that the modern historians were in grievous 
error in their reading of our national history, and he had 
a real respect for historical accuracy: he was the living 
image of his own creation, Mr. Hatton, "who had ac- 
quired, from his severe habits of historical research, a 
respect only for what was authentic." When modern 
historians and newspaper writers "statistically proved 
that the general condition of the people was much better 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 231 

at that moment than it had been at any known period of 
history," Disraeli puts into the mouth of old Gerard, 
the real hero of Sybil, the answer: "Ah! yes, I know 
that style of speculation, your gentleman who reminds 
us that a working man now has a pair of cotton stockings, 
and that Henry the Eighth himself was not so well off. 
... I deny the premises; I deny that the condition of 
the main body is better now than at any period of our 
history; that it is as good as it has been at several. I 
say, for instance, the people were better clothed, better 
lodged, and better fed just before the War of the Roses 
than at this moment. . . . Look at the average term of 
life. ... In this district, among the working classes, it 
is seventeen." To which Egremont replies: "In old 
days they had terrible pestilences." "But they touched 
all alike," said Gerard. "We have more pestilence now 
in England than we ever had, but it only reaches the 
poor." 

Disraeli read English history, and it convinced him 
that the democracy of the Middle Ages, and of the Stuart 
times even, possessed a larger share of the nation's 
wealth and happiness than the people held in the days 
of modern "Progress." He admitted that there was 
enormous wealth in modern England; but he pointed out, 
first, that it was out of all proportion in the hands of a 
few members of the community; and, secondly, that mod- 
ern wealth did not necessarily mean health and happi- 
ness, but, on the contrary, resulted in sheer stupidity and 
vulgar trivialities. Disraeli's opinion on the first point 
was formed after a tour through industrial England 
which he made (in 1844) with a few of his friends. 
He told the tale (softened, he said, to make it bearable 



232 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

for the public nerves) in Sybil. It is the usual ghastly 
tale that has been repeated a hundred thousand times 
since by every street-corner Socialist and by everyone 
who is sufficiently well educated to know the facts — and, 
to tell the truth, the public nerves have stood it with the 
robust vigour of a butcher trained in the slaughter- 
house. This is not the place to repeat the evidence; two 
or three sentences from Sybil are sufficient to show the 
line of the argument: "Naked to the waist, an iron 
chain fastened to a belt of leather runs between their 
legs clad in canvas trousers, while on hands and feet an 
English girl, for twelve, sometimes for sixteen hours a 
day, hauls and hurries tubs of coal up subterranean roads, 
dark, precipitous and plashy; circumstances that seem to 
have escaped the notice of the Society for the Abolition 
of Negro Slavery. These worthy gentlemen, too, appear 
to have been singularly unconscious of the sufferings of 
the little trappers, which was remarkable, as many of 
them were in their own employ. . . . Infants of four 
and five years of age. . . . Their labour, indeed, is not 
severe, for that would be impossible, but it is passed in 
darkness and solitude. . . . Hour after hour passes, and 
all that reminds the infant trappers of the world they 
have quitted and that which they have joined is the pas- 
sage of the coal waggons. . . ." And this was modern 
progress, the age of great industry and greater wealth. 
Inconceivable though it may appear, Disraeli refused to 
accept it with the favour or enthusiasm with which it was 
welcomed by the majority of the historians and econ- 
omists of the age. He had carefully examined the 
civilization of Western Europe, and it failed to interest 
him — indeed, it revolted him. 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 233 

He turned for mental relief to an age when there were 
monasteries instead of factories, and abbots and gentle- 
men instead of bankers and manufacturers and a sham 
nobility. "If we must have an aristocracy, I would rather 
that its younger branches should be monks and nuns than 
colonels without regiments, or housekeepers of royal 
palaces that exist only in name. Besides, see what an 
advantage to a minister if the unendowed aristocracy 
were thus provided for now. He need not, like a min- 
ister in these days, intrust the conduct of public affairs 
to individuals notoriously incompetent, appoint to the 
command of expeditions generals who never saw a field, 
make governors of colonies out of men who never could 
govern themselves, or find an ambassador in a broken 
dandy or a blasted favourite." He recalled the beauty 
of the old land: "In England and Wales alone there 
were of these institutions of different sizes, I mean mon- 
asteries, and chantries and chapels, and great hospitals, 
considerably upwards of three thousand; all of them fair 
buildings, many of them of exquisite beauty . . . estab- 
lishments that were as vast and as magnificent and as 
beautiful as your Belvoirs and your Chatsworths, your 
Wentworths and your Stowes. . . . The monks were 
never non-resident. They expended their revenue among 
those whose labours had produced it . . . they made 
the country beautiful, and the people proud of their 
country." 

Disraeli's claim that the monks were the protectors and 
trustees of the people's wealth, rather than of the self- 
interest of the Church, naturally roused the question why 
the people had not risen to save the monasteries from 
the robbers of the Reformation. The answer is : "They 



234 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

did, but too late. They struggled for a century, but they 
struggled against property, and they were beat." Since 
the Reformation, the history of England in Disraeli's 
judgment was the story of how these thieves of the 
Church's wealth had gradually collected into their hands 
almost all the possessions and all the governing power 
of the nation, and had dispossessed the people of both. 
The story finishes with a bitter thrust worthy of this 
master with the rapier : "I don't know whether the union 
workhouses will remove it. They are building something 
for the people at last. After an experiment of three cen- 
turies, your gaols being full and your treadmills losing 
something of their virtue, you have given us a substitute 
for the monasteries." The men who were there in the 
place of the communal monks Disraeli regarded as the 
greatest curse of England. They had divided their coun- 
try into two classes — "the Rich and the Poor," which 
was the sub-title he gave to the romance Sybil. Whereas 
in the old days there had been distinct classes indeed, 
but with a juster balance of the duties and the rewards. 
The nobles had their privileges, no doubt, but they had 
their duties, and their share of the wealth was but a 
fraction of the sum that the modern masters have seized 
at the price of the degradation of the people. There 
were yeomen who owned their land in the merrier Eng- 
land, and the people had their common rights. Where 
were these in Disraeli's day? Helpless under the ruth- 
less hand of such as the Earl de Mowbray of Mowbray 
Castle — this new apparition in English society. He had 
bought his title and his estates out of the fortune of his 
grandfather, late waiter of a London club, who had made 
that fortune by holding up the rice of India until its peo- 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 235 

pie were starving: "The great forestallers came to the 
rescue of the people over whose destinies they presided; 
and at the same time fed, and pocketed, millions." It 
revolted Disraeli that the grandson should be one of the 
lords of England because his grandfather, John Warren, 
had behaved like a knave in India. 

Disraeli's conception of democracy was essentially 
Eastern; writing for Englishmen, he expressed it in terms 
of our own Middle Ages, because that was the nearest 
thing to it he would find in our Western civilization. He 
believed in all that fundamental freedom which was main- 
tained in the widespreading local government which was 
the basis of the mediaeval world. The historians have 
been attracted unduly by the barons, forgetting that the 
people then possessed rights which the new plutocrats of 
to-day have crushed out under the pompous names of 
Progress and Liberty. Still, Disraeli did not imagine 
that the people could govern themselves : "Dismiss from 
your mind these fallacious fancies. The People are not 
strong; the People never can be strong. Their attempts 
at self-vindication will end only in their suffering and 
confusion." He was writing in the days of the Charter 
struggles, and, whatever one may think of his theories, at 
least history so far has sadly confirmed them. We can 
trace in Sybil how the fine earnestness of the democracy 
was frittered away by the ignorance, the treachery, the 
mean ambitions, the endless conflicts of the leaders the 
people had set up to guide them. Sybil herself had been 
all enthusiasm for a purely popular movement — until it 
was tried; and then: "I was but a dreamer of dreams: 
I wake from my hallucinations, as others have done. 
. . . The people are not disciplined; their actions will 



236 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

not be, cannot be coherent." There are possibilities of 
democratic movement that the Eastern mind could 
scarcely be expected to grasp — but who can say that 
Disraeli was very far wrong when he wrote, though it 
may not be so true to-day? 

Anyhow, Disraeli conceived of a perfect society where 
there would be no idle fancies of equality. There was to 
be a Crown that would receive back again much of the 
power that the greedy aristocrats of the Reformation and 
Hanoverian times had snatched from it; and this royal 
power was to be used in the future as Disraeli claimed, 
with much historical accuracy, as it had been used in 
the past — to protect the people of England from the 
tyranny of the wealthy. He claimed, and again there is 
vast historical evidence behind his assertion, that the 
Stuart Charles was a martyr in this cause. Then, the 
Church was once more to be made an independent force 
in national affairs, and was no longer to be the tool of 
the governing clique, with its bishops the nominees of a 
Minister of State. And the foundation of all was to be 
the People, for whose good the Crown and the Church 
were but a means to an end. "In the selfish strife of 
factions, two great existences have been blotted out of 
the history of England — the Monarch and the Multitude; 
as the power of the Crown has diminished, the privileges 
of the People have disappeared, till at length the sceptre 
has become a pageant, and its subject has again degen- 
erated into a serf. . . . There is a whisper arising in this 
country that Loyalty is not a phrase, Faith not a delusion, 
and Popular Liberty something more diffusive and sub- 
stantial than the profane exercise of the sacred rights of 
sovereignty by political classes." The one class for whom 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 237 

there was no room in Disraeli's Commonwealth was the 
class of the idle and vulgar rich. 

But beneath all Disraeli's writings there is a deep 
undertone of a creed that is far wider, far greater, than 
anything that he expressed as a political dogma. The 
remedy for the troubles of modern society could not be 
put into the form of a parliamentary Bill, or a thousand 
of them. We began by saying that Disraeli was a poet. 
By an unlucky fate he became a politician, and much of 
what he saw was expressed in terms of politics. But it 
seems quite clear that this was not the ultimate thought 
in his mind. He wrote of politics in his novels for much 
the same reason that he put his political ideas into roman- 
tic form — in order that it might catch the ears of a public 
not too finely tuned to the higher notes of the universe. 
Being a wit and a dandy and a fashionable man about 
Town, he thought it might seem affected if it became 
known that Mr. Disraeli was convinced that what Eng- 
land wanted was a change of soul, and not a change of 
political parties or even the restoration of the Monarchy. 
But that was the actual truth. He had much more in 
common with the revivalist preacher than with most other 
fanatics. He thought England would not recover until 
she had a moral revival. "Their Charter is a coarse 
specific for our social evils. The spirit that would cure 
our ills must be of a deeper and finer mood," he wrote. 

His moral change of heart would have considerably 
startled the revivalist preacher to whom he has just been 
rashly compared; not because Disraeli was in the least 
insincere in his call for the higher morality, but just 
because the professional revivalists are sometimes a little 
narrow in their conceptions, while this statesman had all 



238 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

the fickle fancies of the amateur. There are many sen- 
tences in Disraeli's confession of faith that must have 
made the orthodox enthusiasts very hopeful at the first 
glance. "Unless we bring man nearer to heaven, unless 
government become again divine, the insignificance of the 
human scheme must paralyse all effort." Except that it is 
better literature, that might pass inspection in a village 
conventicle. Again, another sentence from Tancred 
aroused hope: "I would lift up my voice to heaven, and 
ask, What is Duty, and what is Faith? What ought I 
to do, and what ought I to believe?" It is true there is 
the undertone of restless scepticism in the inquiry; but it 
certainly showed desire for spiritual truth if it could be 
found. Let no one imagine that Disraeli was anything 
but entirely sincere when he touched on religion. He 
was desperately in earnest, without a shadow of doubt, 
and this spirit lay very closely below the surface of all 
he wrote. His passionate sarcasm can generally be traced 
very quickly to a fierce moral conviction. He really 
meant what he said when he called for a great change of 
heart. 

Yet it was not the change the revivalists contemplated. 
If they had been referred to Disraeli's chief book on 
religion, namely, Tancred, or the New Crusade, they 
must have been in some degree startled to note that the 
first chapter is an exceedingly charming and dainty dis- 
quisition on French cookery and French cooks. If the 
delights of the flesh are sinful, then these artists of the 
kitchen were not, surely, on the direct road to Paradise. 
For their little world had worldly aims. " 'It is some- 
thing to have served under Napoleon,' added Prevost, 
with the grand air of the Imperial kitchen. 'Had it not 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 239 

been for Waterloo I should have had the cross. But the 
Bourbons and the cooks of the Empire never could under- 
stand each other. . . . When Monsieur passed my soup 
of Austerlitz untasted, I knew the old family was 
doomed.' " They may have been as sincere as the re- 
vivalists, but it is patent that they were seeking different 
crosses. Perhaps it will be better to cease using, in 
connection with Disraeli's faith, that much confusing 
word "religion." It is usually held to connote some 
kind of dogmatic belief that priests can put into a creed 
and theologians can debate in class-rooms with their 
ecclesiastical pupils. There is singularly little of creed 
or theology, in the limited sense, in anything Disraeli has 
to say on religion. His moral convictions are much 
nearer akin to the language of the poets and the wit of 
the wisest men of the world; and a great deal of it is 
expressed with the flavour of aggressive sarcasm which 
certainly does not remind one of the primitive Christian 
faith. 

That amazing portrait of the bishop in Tattered gives 
many hints of what Disraeli meant by religion. The 
Duke of Bellamont desired his son to go into Parliament, 
whereas the young gentleman on coming of age expressed 
a desire to worship at the holy tomb in Palestine. He 
was disgusted with politics, even before he entered 
political life. He first demanded a faith and a conviction 
of duty. The Duchess, his mother, was surely reasonable 
in thinking that if anyone could supply such desirable 
convictions it must be her favourite bishop. His utter 
failure to do so is a concise summary of Disraeli's meas- 
urement of orthodox Christianity. His sketch of the 
bishop is one of the masterpieces of English literature. 



240 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

The Duchess had already told us that he was "a great 
statesman as well as the first theologian of the age." 
He had sprung into early fame by proclaiming that 
Ireland was on the point of shaking herself free from 
the Church of Rome and coming into the Protestant fold : 
a declaration by which that earnest Protestant, the 
Duchess of Bellamont, "instantly recognized the man of 
God." Strangely enough, she continued to believe in his 
prophetic insight, notwithstanding that "the impending 
second Reformation did chance to take the untoward 
form of the emancipation of the Roman Catholics, fol- 
lowed in due season by the destruction of Protestant 
bishoprics, the sequestration of Protestant tithes, and the 
endowment of Maynooth." And then Disraeli tells us 
why this bishop had become the most famous in the land. 
"He combined a great talent for action with very 
limited powers of thought . . . stimulated by an ambi- 
tion that knew no repose, and with a capacity for master- 
ing details. . . . He was one of those leaders who are 
not guides. . . . The bustling intermeddler was unable 
to supply society with a single solution. . . . All his 
quandaries terminated in the same catastrophe — a com- 
promise. Abstract principles with him ever ended in 
concrete expediency. . . . The bishop, always ready, 
had in the course of his episcopal career placed himself 
at the head of every movement in the Church which 
others had originated, and had as regularly withdrawn 
at the right moment, when the heat was over, or had 
become, on the contrary, excessive." It was to such a 
man that Tancred was sent in his spiritual difficulties. 
The interview was mutually unsatisfactory. The bishop, 
having neither fixed principles nor a sincere faith, quickly 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 241 

tied himself into an undignified knot: "he was lost in a 
maze of phrases, and afforded his pupil not a single 
fact." Tancred appeals to him to say how society may 
be governed by God rather than by man. All the bishop 
can point out is his great hope that there will soon be a 
bishop in Manchester. "But I want to see an angel at 
Manchester," insists Tancred — and the interview obvi- 
ously cannot continue. 

It is little to be wondered at that the bishop could not 
satisfy Tancred (or Disraeli) out of the wisdom of his 
palace library: for neither wanted a theology. After 
reading what Disraeli had to plead for religion, one has 
the impression that he would not have made many in- 
quiries concerning a man's creed when he was once satis- 
fied that he loved the beautiful and possessed all that 
varied collection of virtues which one sums up as an 
honest heart. He probably never drew any character he 
respected more than Walter Gerard, who died for his 
convictions that England should again be made a place 
of beauty instead of a refuse-heap at the mouth of a 
coal-pit — he was, in short, an artist and a man of reason. 
Perhaps, if the whole were known, it may be that Disraeli 
would rather have had a man gifted with a sense of 
beauty than with a gift of complete truthfulness. It may 
be that his love for the truth grew rather from his artistic 
sense than from his moral convictions. After all, the 
artist's mind is the realist's mind — quite contrary to the 
common opinion that would call him a sentimentalist. 
The eye of the artist sees more acutely and accurately 
than the eye of the average man. Now, to see accurately 
is to see the truth, and to realize the truth is to know that 
dishonesty is a clumsy thing that does not pay in the long 



242 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

run. Disraeli wanted men to be honest and just with each 
other because he had so keen an eye that it told him that 
England (and other places) was miserable because it was 
ruled by men who were selfish or dishonest or stupid, or 
all three. He called for a "New Crusade" that would 
give them great ideals, moral convictions, and a deter- 
mination to be cultured people before they were million- 
aires or any other sort of worldly success. He may have 
called his creed Christianity, but it was something which 
can be found in all the creeds, whether they be of pagans 
or Christians, or of poet or priest. 

It was a sportive chance that threw Disraeli on the 
shores of England; he could scarcely have been more out 
of place if Fate had carried him a little further north and 
landed him at the Pole. Every fibre of him had the love 
of warmth and colour. It is clear from a thousand pas- 
sages in his books that his ideals were those of the pagan. 
The more emotional of his readers will think of Tancred 
as the hero who went to the East to worship at the tomb 
of his Saviour; but the more studiously minded will re- 
member that on the last page we find him at the feet of 
Eva. He went to seek a Faith ; is it quite by chance that 
he found a woman who "presented the perfection of 
Oriental beauty, such as it existed in Eden?" Disraeli's 
religion was very real and true, without doubt, but his 
paganism was the deeper note. His ancestors had been 
nomads of the desert before they found the One God; 
and Disraeli was a mysterious survival of the past in a 
modern world, where he was always rebellious and ill 
at ease. 

This strange being who aspired to rule (and did rule) 
England had the utmost contempt for our whole civiliza- 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 243 

tion — which was only natural, since he was a pagan. 
What is unnatural is that he should ever have desired to 
rule us and that he should have succeeded. When he 
was in his twenty-fourth year or so, he published a little 
book, Popanilla, in which he told us exactly what he 
thought of us and our whole social system. He did not 
think much of it. There is scarcely a line of it which 
does not express utter contempt for all the things we 
have been so proud of doing in the world. The book 
contains Disraeli's philosophy of life : it contains his creed 
for this world, as Tancred (written twenty years after- 
wards) professes to tell us more of his creed for the 
next; and there is much that is common to both. Popanilla 
is one of the most amazingly brilliant social skits that 
English literature has produced. When the last page 
has been reached there is not much left of the Utilitarians, 
the Economists, the Governing Set, and Modern Society 
in general. This vast structure called "civilization," in- 
stead of being an admirable thing, appears to be half a 
stupid blunder and half a crime. 

The story begins on the pagan island of Fantaisie, 
where nothing much happens except perpetual summer 
and continuous dancing and love-making all the delicious 
nights long. The inhabitants are an "innocent and a 
happy, though a voluptuous and ignorant race. They 
have no manufactures, no commerce, no agriculture and 
no printing-presses . . . for intellectual amusement they 
have a pregnant fancy and a ready wit." It is a common 
superstition in the West of Europe that the acquiring of 
knowledge has been the foundation of all our happiness 
and prosperity. Disraeli turned the tables on us and 
showed how a shipwrecked box of books of learning 



244 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

almost brought moral and material disaster to this idyllic 
island. The evil books fell into the hands of an unfor- 
tunate islander who was hunting for a lost lock of his 
mistress's hair. Had he found it, all would have been 
well, perhaps. 

But instead, he read the whole box of books, and "now 
discovered with dismay that he and his fellow-islanders 
were nothing more than a horde of useless savages." He 
rushed to explain to the king the utter folly of being 
merely happy — it did not pay. "If there were no utility 
in pleasure, it was quite clear that pleasure could profit no 
one. If, therefore, it were unprofitable, it was injurious; 
because that which does not produce a profit is equivalent 
to a loss; therefore pleasure is a losing business; conse- 
quently pleasure is not pleasant." He showed the king 
very clearly that "the development of utility is therefore 
the object of our being," and that man is "a developing 
animal. Development is the discovery of utility." They 
must learn to disregard this low pursuit of pleasure, for 
"a nation might be extremely happy, extremely powerful, 
and extremely rich, although every individual member of 
it might at the same time be miserable, dependent and in 
debt." And so this speech goes on until: "He finished 
by re-urging in strong terms the immediate development 
of the island. In the first place, a great metropolis must 
be instantly built, because a great metropolis always pro- 
duces a great demand; and moreover, Popanilla had some 
legal doubts whether a country without a capital could in 
fact be considered a State." If they would only apply 
themselves earnestly to developments, "Popanilla had 
no hesitation in saying that a short time could not elapse 
ere, instead of passing their lives in a state of unprofitable 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 245 

ease and useless enjoyment, they might reasonably expect 
to be the terror and astonishment of the universe, and to 
be able to annoy every nation of any consequence." In 
fact, said this audacious Disraeli (who desired to become 
Prime Minister), as clearly as burlesque would allow him 
to say, the islanders were to embark on the attempt to 
become another England. 

But there was more wisdom in Fantaisie than this 
hysterical student suspected in his condition of intellectual 
drunkenness. When his speech ended, the monarch had 
a fit of laughter and said: "I have not an idea what this 
man is talking about, but I know that he makes my head 
ache; give me a cup of wine, and let us have a dance." 
Eventually, to make quite sure that this dangerous habit 
of learning should not spread, the islanders put the only 
lunatic the island possessed — the man who had read the 
books — into a canoe, and set him adrift to seek another 
land that suited him better. He discovered England, the 
island of Vraibleusia, with its capital city of Hubbabub. 
The rest is a shrieking pantomime of brilliant wit; the 
sum total is that it laughs the whole nation off the stage. 
Our liberty, our finance, the bankers, the National Debt, 
our officials, smart society, the land system, the law, the 
Cabinet — in short, everything about us — is made into a 
laughing-stock, where all the laughs are on one side. 
England is "shown up." Of course, Disraeli was quite 
safe : there were not many people who were bright 
enough to see they were being laughed at. If it were not 
for the dull, men like this Jewish wit-philosopher would 
not be safe. 

The important thing the book teaches is that Disraeli 
totally rejected the ideals of modern society: he thought 



246 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

the development theory stupid and the laws of utility 
mainly folly. And, in any case, he made it quite plain 
that he considered the islanders of Fantaisie the wiser 
people. The imagined perfection of the system of Vrai- 
bleusia was a sheer myth: the inhabitants thought they 
were a great and a wealthy people, whereas they were tied 
in a knot of contradictions that left only confusion and 
worry. Even their liberty was a delusion; for "free con- 
stitutions are apt to be misunderstood until half of the 
nation are bayoneted and the rest imprisoned." The 
dull people, forgetting Oliver Cromwell and many more, 
said this was a stupid exaggeration; but almost all Dis- 
raeli's wit is based on sound historical facts, and there is 
scarcely a line of this Popanilla that might not be used 
as a historical text-book. Disraeli did not build an Eng- 
land of his own imagination; he took the land as it ex- 
isted. The imagination was all on the side of the people 
who thought — and still think — that our modern system is 
the creation of rational men and women. Disraeli said, 
as clearly as wit could say, that it was entirely irrational. 
Such being the Disraeli who wrote and thought, there 
remains the other Disraeli who went into politics. It was 
a double life indeed ; and it is interesting to discover from 
Disraeli himself what was the nature of the link between 
the two. We have seen how his wife had recorded that 
her husband was exceedingly ambitious to become famous, 
and that he had chosen politics for his career. He was 
surely wise; for he had listened to the debates in the 
Houses and he knew he could easily win in a game like 
that. He had brains and he had the gift of a ready 
tongue. There was a good deal of the latter quality in 
Parliament, but the intellectual fuel was not overabun- 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 247 

dant. Anyhow, Disraeli chose politics, and it is unlikely 
that he had failed to measure the factors of the problem. 
When, in his early life, he had frankly told Lord Mel- 
bourne, "I want to be Prime Minister," that typical 
member of the governing class had been equally frank: 
"You must put all these foolish notions out of your head," 
adding the details that for such a post the stringent regu- 
lations were "old blood, high rank, great fortune and 
greater ability." By which answer his lordship proved 
himself to be a very foolish prophet and a very conceited 
man. Of course, in a worldly sense Melbourne was right. 
What was wrong about his estimate was the usual bad 
judgment of the whole governing class — he put ability 
last on the list of the qualifications. As it happened, 
Disraeli had enough ability to swamp all the attached 
schedule of necessary virtues. He could circle round the 
Lord Melbournes and their class as a racing yacht can 
circle round a barge. Even all their blood and rank and 
fortune could not pull them through when they met a 
man with brains. 

Nevertheless, the young Disraeli could scarcely know 
this — a great deal of recent history was against him. 
For a hundred and fifty years England had submitted to 
the rule of men such as Melbourne had described. But 
Disraeli had good grounds for his confidence. What is 
more difficult to understand is his decision that the game 
was worth the trouble, or, still more, that it could be 
adjusted to his moral convictions. There is no doubt of 
the sincerity of the religious and social creed that he had 
expounded in his books. It was a very lofty and noble 
creed, whereas he had himself proved that political life 
was a cesspool of meanness. Even his own great gift of 



248 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

speech he had described in Popanilla as one of the chief 
dangers of popular freedom: a glib tongue could snatch 
away more liberty than it won. It was one of the most 
profoundly true things that Disraeli ever said, and the 
concealment of that truth is one of the chief necessities 
of the political agitator, who lives by his tongue as hon- 
ester men live by making chairs or wheelbarrows. On 
page after page Disraeli had exposed the futilities and 
sordidness of politics. "It is hardly possible," he wrote 
in Coningsby, "that a young man could rise from the 
study of these annals without a confirmed disgust for 
political intrigue; a dazzling practice, apt at first to 
fascinate youth, for it appeals at once to our invention 
and our courage, but one which should only be the 
resource of the second-rate. Great minds must trust to 
great truths and great talents for their rise, and nothing 
else." 

He himself proved that politics was one long compro- 
mise, and often in vain. He did not even believe in the 
representative system : when Tancred left for Palestine 
he said: "I go to a land that has never been blessed by 
that fatal drollery called a representative government." 
Disraeli believed in a strong monarch, and he believed in 
strong and active municipal administration. But then he 
did not ask to be made a king or a town councillor — he 
went into the House of Commons. He had defined the 
alternatives: "Was it to be a Tory government, or an 
Enlightened-Spirit-of-the-Age Liberal-Moderate-Reform 
government? Was it to be a government of high philos- 
ophy or of low practice; of principle or of expediency; of 
great measures or of little men? A government of states- 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 249 

men or of clerks? Of Humbug or Humdrum?" Note 
the final contrast: it all came to Humbug or Humdrum 
in the end. At the bottom of his heart Disraeli knew 
he was what he made Sidonia say for him: "I am and 
must ever be but a dreamer of dreams" — and yet he be- 
came a politician. 

He knew that meant an end of his dreams. He was 
continually warning his readers of the danger of infection 
in public life. As he launched his hero and heroine on the 
last page of Coningsby he wrote: "They stand on the 
threshold of public life. . . . Will they maintain in 
august assemblies and high places the great truths which, 
in study and solitude, they have embraced? Or will their 
courage exhaust itself in the struggle? . . . Will their 
skilled intelligence subside into being the adroit tool of a 
corrupt party? Will Vanity confound their fortunes or 
Jealousy wither their sympathies?" And that was not 
the most hopeless side of the problem; for he might have 
had sufficient sureness that he could resist temptation to 
betray his principles. But he knew that the irony of 
political life was that high principles were as impossible 
in that atmosphere as a fish is impossible on the dry 
land or a quadruped in the sea. His incorruptible Sybil 
"found to her surprise that great thoughts have very 
little to do with the business of the world; that human 
affairs, even in an age of revolution, are the subject of 
compromise; and that the essence of compromise is little- 
ness." She saw that the popular leaders, picked out by 
the people themselves, were, like the rest, filled with "wild 
ambitions and sinister and selfish ends." The two earnest 
and sincere labour leaders of Sybil, Dandy Mick and 



250 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

Devilsdust, became "the firm of Radley, Mowbray and 
Co. . . . and will probably furnish in time a crop of 
members of Parliament and peers of the realm." 

Disraeli went into Parliament as a career, because he 
had no great hopes of achieving anything except his 
ambitions; his principles he never imagined he could 
reach. He did not believe in any possibility of sudden 
change: being a historian and a sane man, he knew that 
men can never force the pace of their affairs; they are 
always the sons of their fathers and the inheritors of the 
virtues and vices of the last generations; and they will 
transmit their own to the next, in great part. The re- 
former, therefore, is rather the spectator at a play than 
an originator of some new plan; and even if he be an 
actor on the stage, he can but speak the lines set down 
in his part. Reform in Disraeli's mind was little more 
than the continuation of history. When Mr. Cassilis is 
explaining the "Young England" movement which 
summed up Disraeli's ideals in public life, he said: "They 
say it requires a deuced deal of history. One must brush 
up one's Goldsmith. Canterton used to be the fellow for 
history at White's. He was always boring one with 
William the Conqueror, Julius Caesar, and all that sort 
of thing." But if Reform was only the next chapter of 
history, Disraeli had made up his mind to be something 
approaching a Conqueror himself. 

In short, Disraeli was a real Democrat: he believed 
that we can never get beyond the traditions and desires 
of the nation as a great whole : "If the nation that elects 
the Parliament be corrupt, the elected body will resemble 
it. The nation that is corrupt deserves to fall. But 
this only shows that there is something to be considered 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 251 

beyond forms of government, national character. And 
herein mainly should we repose our hopes. If a nation 
be led to aim at the good and the great, depend upon it, 
whatever be its form, the Government will respond to its 
convictions and its sentiments." Most of the things 
they discussed in Parliament were idle fancies in Disraeli's 
reading of political science — they simply did not matter. 
He thought constitutional changes rather hindered re- 
form than brought it nearer; and he must have been 
laughing in his sleeve during most of the debates wherein 
he figured so brilliantly in the Houses. "In a word, 
true wisdom lies in the policy which would effect its ends 
by the influence of opinion, and yet by the means of exist- 
ing forms." It would be the truest reading of Disraeli's 
record if we regard his books, up to Tancred, at least, 
as the main part of his career — when he was educating 
his fellow-citizens to think accurately and to feel nobly. 
For the rest of his life — his political career — he took to 
politics as others take to golf or archaeology or collecting 
beetles, as a hobby for one's spare time or one's retired 
years. The books were the real Disraeli, in his serious 
mood. The speeches in Parliament, the high offices of 
State, were merely the flavouring sauces of life, the 
liqueur after dinner. Disraeli's great political success 
displayed not his strength, but his weakness, his human 
frailty, which could not resist the applause of the crowd, 
which insisted that he should strive to be great, not in 
the opinion of the wise, but in the opinion of to-morrow 
morning's newspaper leader. We read Disraeli's novels 
for the good of our morals and our intellects — and their 
wit is thrown in as a reward. But his political career 
may be neglected unless we seek for the amusement of a 



252 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

first-class tale of adventure. "Adventures are to the ad- 
venturous," he wrote; and the man who started his po- 
litical career by suggesting to the politicians in possession 
that the lowness of their principles was only equalled 
by the meanness of their methods, who declared that the 
hated race to which he belonged was one of the greatest 
and noblest factors in history — such a man had clearly 
made up his mind to a frontal attack in broad daylight. 
He was surely the lightest-hearted adventurer who ever 
set forth with his fortune on his back. In this case the 
fortune was entirely in his head, though his enemies 
might have hinted that a large part of it was on his em- 
broidered waistcoats. 

His early career in the House of Commons (it began 
in 1837) was the finest part of it — when he was untram- 
melled by office and a freebooter of the reputations of his 
opponents. Whenever he had a moment to spare in the 
political moves, he was maintaining the principles of 
his philosophy of life, the wit of it as well as the matter. 
He was his best real self in those earlier years — with all 
his contempt for the insincerity and dull pomp of politics. 
A letter to his wife relates his first sitting and the elec- 
tion of the Speaker: "Shaw Lefevre proposed, and 
Strutt of Derby seconded, Abercromby. Both were 
brief; the first commonplace, the other commonplace and 
coarse; all was tame. Peel said a very little, very well. 
Then Abercromby, who looked like an old laundress, 
mumbled and moaned some dullness, and was then 
carried to a chair, and said a little more amid a faint 
dull cheer." Disraeli succeeded in the House of Com- 
mons because he had a fine contempt for it. He was 
howled down in his maiden speech, when he told its dull 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 253 

"old laundress" that the great Reform Act which they 
thought such a miracle of political wisdom had been use- 
less: "the stain of boroughmongering had only assumed 
a deeper and darker hue," and elections were more cor- 
rupt than before. The House, which is tolerant of 
trivial party squabbles, at this attack on its sacred system 
of privileges behaved rather after the manner of a foot- 
ball crowd that has taken a dislike to the referee. It was 
a sign that this man was not only the opponent of half 
the House, but a radical objector to the whole of it. 

Strangely enough, Peel, who ought to have been able 
to judge men by this time, imagined that he had gained 
a valuable supporter in the new member. It only showed 
what a dull-witted fellow Sir Robert was; for Disraeli 
made his commanding position in Parliament by a series 
of attacks on this Prime Minister and his policy which 
not merely won the astonished admiration of the Com- 
mons, but set all Europe — which could scarcely be ex- 
pected to take our internal politics very seriously — into 
shrieks of laughter. To set up the free-lance Disraeli 
to debate against the established Peel had the natural re- 
sult. Peel came out of the contest as an earnest curate 
would emerge from a debate with Mr. Bernard Shaw. 
Peel was half drowned. He was saved, when it came to 
votes, because there was a majority of dull people in the 
House like himself. But each night, as he was pulled 
out of the torrent of Disraeli's brilliant sarcasm, it was 
a pitiable object that was hauled on the bank. 

The subject-matter of these famous speeches against 
Peel mainly centred round the Corn Laws. But it was 
much more than a question of finance, of custom duties, 
oi cheap food. The struggle between the old England 



254 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

of farmers and the new England of factories had at last 
come to the crisis. The significance of Disraeli's posi- 
tion in our political history is that he was the beginning 
of the political reaction against the Industrial Revolution. 
When he entered the House of Commons in 1837, the 
full horrors of the new capitalist factory system had ar- 
rived. The new school of statesmen appeared to ap- 
prove of this system as a whole, however much they 
might want to soften its rough corners. Even a man 
who called for Factory Acts and Truck Acts might still 
be glad that the Industrial Revolution had happened. 
Peel and Bright and Cobden were the men who repre- 
sented all that the new industry meant in our history; 
and they were followed by the Gladstones and the high 
finance of the present-day Cabinets. Disraeli was the 
first great statesman to cry halt in our mad progress. 
As we have seen, in Popanilla he poured scorn on the 
whole modern system of economics and politics. He 
flatly refused to accept the popular cry that Utility was 
the supreme test of social wealth. It was not to give the 
farmers high prices that he fought to preserve the Corn 
Laws ; that was only an incident in his desire to preserve 
the agriculture of England because it was a healthy hu- 
man tradition that the farmer is the base of all the best 
nations. A factory might pay higher profits, which 
might be a sufficient argument for a materialist like Peel 
or the Quaker Bright. But Disraeli, who did not meas- 
ure the happiness of man by his balance-sheet, thought 
that it was worth preserving English cornfields, even if 
we paid a higher price for our bread. 

The great struggle went against Disraeli. The manu- 
facturers got cheap corn, which meant cheaper labour; 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 255 

the working man was convinced that cheap bread was a 
clear gain for himself; so Disraeli — the inspirer of the 
resistance to Free Trade — persuaded the Tory party that 
it must accept the verdict of the majority. There are 
not many men who sacrifice their principles in order to 
remain a democrat ! This battle, the first of his political 
career, brought the ideals of his books to the test. It 
was a sharp lesson to him that he was a dreamer in an 
age that was very wide awake in the work of making 
money. He never really believed that the ideals of his 
books would be practical politics in the House of Com- 
mons; and his career became the rather pointless journey 
of that day-to-day manoeuvring which is the normal ex- 
istence of the ordinary political leader. It would be hard 
to find any case where Disraeli did anything which was a 
betrayal of his ideals; but it would be equally hard to give 
any case where he did much to make any fundamental 
change in the direction of his old dreams. But one great 
line of policy certainly owes much to him, if not the 
main credit. The passionate protests of Sybil against 
the horrors of industrial life fixed social reform as the 
perpetual disturber of the peace of the callous Houses 
of Parliament. 

Disraeli's social novels were the creative force of that 
"Young England" party which for a few years, in the 
forties, looked as though it might be the beginning of a 
new phase of national politics. It was but a very rapidly 
passing flicker of light in a very dark world. The men 
who appear as the heroes of Disraeli's novels were in 
real life the leaders of "Young England," but unfortu- 
nately they also had to act as the rank and file — for there 
were not enough followers to supply privates as well as 



256 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

officers in this army of idealists. Perhaps it was 
Disraeli's speech, in 1839, in defence of the Chartists 
that founded the little group. When the House of Com- 
mons refused to receive the Great Petition, this young 
member (who Peel thought was going to be a support 
for his party of plutocrats) told the chamber that "the 
rights of labour are as sacred as the rights of property." 
But he was almost the only brave and wise man present. 
The natural result of this insolent rejection on the part 
of their masters was rioting, which is the usual result of 
incapable statesmen. In 1843 "Young England" had its 
first pitched battle with the orthodox politicians in an 
attempt to prevent the continued coercion of Ireland by 
physical force by the crude renewal of the Arms Act. 
Disraeli's speech was a hint to the House of Commons 
that at last it had a member who knew something about 
English and Irish history: he informed his audience that 
he had "no faith in any statesman who attempts to 
remedy the evils of Ireland who is either ignorant of the 
past or who will not deign to learn from it." He said 
that the Bill before the House was so futile that it was 
not worth a journey through either lobby; he could only 
hope that a real attempt would be made to penetrate 
"the mystery of this great misgovernment," and bring to 
an end "a state of things that is the bane of England and 
the opprobrium of Europe." Disraeli was perhaps the 
only English statesman of the nineteenth century who 
could have put Irish government on an endurable basis, 
for he was almost the only one who combined historical 
knowledge with imagination and the nature of a gentle- 
man. But there were never enough other gentlemen of 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 257 

imagination to give him a working majority, and dull stu- 
pidity is still in control of Dublin Castle. 

Disraeli's old ideals had another breathing space in the 
new Reform agitation which preceded his Franchise Bill 
of 1867. The great Act of 1832 had merely enfran- 
chised the middle classes; the Act of 1867 was the first 
surrender of political voting power to the poor, which 
had been the cry of the figures of romance in Coningsby 
and Sybil. Disraeli declared his hope that by this meas- 
ure he had helped to resist the advance of a commercial 
plutocracy to supreme power; and he had done it, he be- 
lieved, by thus assisting "the invigorating energies of an 
educated and enfranchised people." This, he reminded 
his audience, was his avowed purpose as long ago as 
1846, when he had made his fight against the repeal of 
the Corn Laws — a repeal which he saw meant the 
strengthening of the middle classes, who, in Disraeli's 
mind, were the foundation of industrial tyranny over the 
poor, in a far more grinding way than the landlords had 
ever been able (even if willing) to exercise it. On the 
surface the Reform Bill of 1867, when it emerged from 
the debates, was in many clauses drafted by Gladstone 
and Bright; and Lord Cranborne, the future Lord Salis- 
bury (the Prime Minister of later days), was full of 
sneers at the insincerity of the creator of the Bill in 
adopting any clauses which would get it through the di- 
vision lobbies. But there is every sort of proof that 
Disraeli was only too glad to have his Tory supporters 
forced into a more democratic measure. And the com- 
parison of the careers of the Tory Disraeli and the Lib- 
eral Gladstone will leave little doubt that the former was 



258 MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

a natural friend of the poor, while the latter regarded 
them as useful factors in his voting strength at a gen- 
eral election. Mr. Gladstone was soon to show his real 
nature by passing an Act which almost crushed Trade 
Unionism, which Disraeli saved by promptly repealing 
the Liberal Act, and then substituting a new Act of 1875, 
when he returned to power. It was during this same 
term of office that the Tory Government passed a batch 
of social measures which were the first systematic at- 
tempt to devise a system of social reform. Such were 
the Factory and Workshop Act of 1878; the Artisans' 
Dwellings Act, 1875; the Friendly Societies Act; the 
Merchant Shipping Act, and the Enclosure of Commons 
Act, which for the first time considered the welfare of 
the general public when enclosures were made. A poor 
little group, perhaps, for the dreamer of the moral and 
economic revolution of England; but what can an idealist 
do in a world that is dull? 

Of the Peace of Berlin — the "peace with honour" — 
of such events as the buying of the Suez Canal shares, the 
history-books are full. They were the least important, 
the least ennobling things that Disraeli did, so we nat- 
urally hear most about them from those who think quietly 
along the well-beaten tracks. But the proclamation (in 
1877) of the Queen of England as Empress of India 
was not merely the display of full-blooded Imperialism 
that the West End clubs and the East End pubs imagined 
and hoped it was. From the days of Coningsby and 
Sybil, Disraeli had looked to the monarchy with a long- 
ing that it might be strengthened to protect the people 
against the oligarchy of the rich. Wrongly or rightly, 
he thought there was less danger of despotism under a 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 259 

strong monarchy than under a strong oligarchy, or even 
under a Parliament which in practice still only repre- 
sented the rich and middle classes — for when the poor 
had votes, how often did they guard their own interests? 
Having the common-sense eyes of the man of imagina- 
tion, Disraeli saw, quite clearly, that they voted as their 
masters ordered. This strengthening of the Crown of 
England by adding the Empire of India to it (however 
unwise and unjust to the Indians, as some may think) was 
yet in Disraeli's eyes a movement towards democracy 
rather than to Imperialism. It was part of his old ideals. 
The little personalities of a man count for so much 
more than his intellect and his ideals. If one really 
wants to know how a man will behave in the House of 
Commons, then watch him in his moments of leisure, in 
his hobbies rather than in the lobbies — indeed, at any 
moment except when he is on the political benches. 
Watch him behind the scenes, not when he is behind the 
footlights and the curtain is up. It is worth remember- 
ing in one's judgment of this man that he (like his con- 
temporary Palmerston) was continually behaving like a 
gentleman when too many of his colleagues in the politi- 
cal world were behaving in manner more appropriate 
to cads. Time after time, when he thought it was for 
the interest of his party or of the nation, Disraeli offered 
to stand on one side, surrendering claims for office which 
were irresistible if he had pressed them. There was 
the day in 1852 when he offered to give up the Leader- 
ship in the Commons to Palmerston and the right to the 
Chancellorship of the Exchequer to Gladstone, if this 
would enable Lord Derby to form a strong Ministry to 
rescue England from the utter mismanagement of the 



2 6o MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN 

Crimean War. It is necessary to remember that much 
of the muddle and confusion had occurred, and the late 
Government of Lord Aberdeen had fallen, largely be- 
cause of the recklessly selfish conduct of Lord John 
Russell, who at this moment could apparently be loyal 
neither to his friends nor to his country. Again, in 
1858, when Derby offered the India Office to Gladstone, 
Disraeli made the most generous advances to enable his 
rival to accept — and for all his thanks he got the stiff 
reply which one would have expected from the most 
narrow-minded political leader of the nineteenth century. 
One other example : Disraeli refused to make party capi- 
tal out of the personal triumph of the Berlin Congress, 
because he believed that these matters of international 
importance should never sink to the level of politicians' 
squabblings. 

But, candidly, to continue to discuss Benjamin Dis- 
raeli's practical life after learning the ideals of his life 
in his books must inevitably bring the disappointment of 
a dull third act after a brilliant first. He was infinitely 
more interesting, more instructive, and more lovable than 
his contemporary statesmen. But he lived in an age 
which could not follow the sweep of his Oriental imagina- 
tion — an age which would probably have adopted the 
manners of the East, his home, and stoned him if he had 
been understood. Perhaps the most pregnant sentence 
he wrote (in Sybil in 1844) summed up his period and 
explained the cause of his failure to reform it: "If a 
spirit of rapacious covctousness, desecrating all the hu- 
manities of life, has been the besetting sin of England 
for the last century and a half, since the passing of the 
Reform Act the altar of Mammon has blazed with triple 



BENJAMIN DISRAELI 261 

worship. To acquire, to accumulate, to plunder each 
other by virtue of philosophic phrases, to propose a 
Utopia to consist only of Wealth and Toil — this has 
been the breathless business of enfranchised England for 
the last twelve years, until we are startled from our 
voracious strife by the wail of intolerable serfage." If 
a man thought that, it was clear that there was no politi- 
cal party which would assist him. As a politician he was 
doomed to failure from the day he started — a somewhat 
doleful thought, when one remembers that he was the 
most wide-visioned statesman that England has produced 
these three hundred years. But then, during that time, 
politics has been a trade for the crafty and the shallow, 
who have succeeded beyond their expectations. 



INDEX 



Abercrombie, Sir Ralph, 158 
Aberdeen, 4th Earl of, 260 
Alfred the Great, 4, 23, 24, 229 
American Colonies, 115, 116, 199, 

202, 209 
Anselm, Archbishop, 5, 87, 230 
Arms Act (Ireland), 256 
Augustus, Emperor of Rome, 1 

Beaconsfield, Earl of (see Dis- 
raeli) 

Beaconsfield, Viscountess (Mrs. 
Disraeli), 214 

Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
S 

Bede, the Venerable, 4 

Bedford, 4th Earl of, 42 

Bedford, Duke of, 189, 192-194 

Beer, G. L. (quoted), 72 

Belgians, Leopold, King of, 212 

Berlin, Treaty of 1878, 258, 260 

Boleyn, Ann, 6 

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 
Lord, 80, 87, 104, 216 

Bolshkaseva, Marie, 207, 208 

Bourchier, Elizabeth (see Crom- 
well, Elizabeth) 

Bright, John, 254, 257 

British Empire, II, 13, 14, 69, 71, 
130-134, 137, 138-143, 144 

Burdett, Sir Francis, 218 

Burghley, Lord; see Cecil Wil- 
liam 

Burke, Edmund, 15-17, 148, 165- 
209 

Burney, Fanny, 173, 174 

Bute, John, Earl of, 226 

Byng, Admiral, 107 



Cabinet System, the, 106 



Campion, Edmund, 78 
Canning, George, 24, 25 
Carnot, L. N. M., 163 
Caroline, Queen of George II, 80, 

84-86, 104, 109 
Carson, Sir Edward, 69 
Carteret, George, afterwards Earl 

Granville, 88, 95, 104, 145, 165 
Catherine the Great of Russia, 

196, 204 
Catholic Emancipation, 157, 240 
Cecil, Robert, 1st Earl of Salis- 
bury, 27 
Cecil, William, Lord Burghley, 7, 

19-25, 33 
Charles I of England, 9, 28 seq., 

54, 57, 58, 74, 236 
Charles II of England, 11, 29, 124 
Charter, the Great, of 1215, 7 
Charter, the Great, of 1839, 237 
Chesterfield, Philip, 4th Earl of, 

150 
Child, Sir Josiah, 124 
Choiseul, Due de, 149 
Churchill, Lord Randolph, 193 
Clarendon, 1st Earl of, 49 
Clark, Sir Andrew, 143 
Clive, Richard, father of Lord 

Clive, 137 
Cnut, King, 4, 204 
Cobden, Richard, 254 
Cobham, Baron, 139 
Colonial Act of 1650, 71 
Commons, supremacy of House 

of, 106, 107 
Company of the Adventurers for 

Plantations, 37 
Coningsby, 213, 219, 222 seq., 248, 

249, 257, 258 
Conscription, Military, 4 



263 



264 



INDEX 



Corn Laws, the, 253, 254, 257 
Cornwallis, Marquis of, 116, 159 
Corporation Act, 178 
Cowper, Lady, 85 
Crimean War, the, 260 
Cromwell, Elizabeth, 39 
Cromwell, Frances, 50 
Cromwell, Sir Henry, 39, 40 
Cromwell, Henry, 71 
Cromwell, Katherine, 39 
Cromwell, Mary, 50 
Cromwell, Oliver, the Protector, 

7, 8, 9, 19, 27-75, 93, 165, 246 
Cromwell, Richard, 39 
Cromwell, Robert, 40 
Cromwell, Thomas, 7, 39 
Cunningham, Dr. (quoted), 21, 37 
Curzon, Sir Nathaniel, 118 

- - %1 
Derby, 14th Earl of, 211, 259, 260 
Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of 

Beaconsfield, 17-19, 76, 156, 

2 1 0-26 r 
Drogheda, siege of, 67 
Dunstan, Archbishop, 4 

East India Company, 37, 124 seq., 
171-177 

Edward I, 5, 24 

Edward IV, 6, 24 

Edward VI, 6 

Eliot, Sir John, 24, 37 

Emily, Princess of England, 109 

Empire, British (see British Em- 
pire) 

Essex, 3d Earl of, 47, 48 

Excise Bill, 1733, 108, 109, m 

Firth, Professor C. H. (quoted), 

39, 47, 55, 68 
Fortescue, Hon. John (quoted), 

152 
Fox, C. J., 162, 172, 174, 176, 178 
Fox, George, 59 
Fox, Henry, 165 



Francis, Sir Philip, 184 
Frederick, the Great, 101 
French Revolution, 177 seq. 

Gardiner, Professor S. R. 

(quoted), 64, 65, 69 
George II, 80, 84, 85, 104, 107 
George III, 103 
Gladstone, W. E., 20, 24, 28, 105, 

254, 257, 259, 260 
Gordon Riots, 188 
Grenvilles, the, 139, H9, 2 <>o 

Gresham, Sir Thomas, 132 

*►- 

Habeas Corpus Act suspended, 

155 
Hammond, Mr. and Mrs. J. L. 

le B. (quoted), 160 
Hampden, John, 35-37, 40-41, 195, 

200 
Hanoverians, the dynasty and 

period, 103, 105, 211 
Hastings, Warren, 173, 175 
Heine, Heinrich, 168, 170, 172 
Henry II of England, 5 
Henry IV of England, 6, 204 
Henry VII of England, 204 
Henry VIII of England, 6 
Herbert, George, 47, 50 
Herries, J. C, 217 
Hervey, Lord John, 86 
Holland, Earl of, 37 
Holland, wars with, 70 
Hume, Joseph, 218 

Indemnity, Acts of, 98 

India, 13, 34, 72, 113, 122 seq., 175, 

176, 234, 235, 259 
India, Empress of, 258 
Industrial Revolution in England, 

7, 182, 254, 255 
Insurance Act, 4, 109 
Ireland, 66-69, J58, 159, 202, 256 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 170 



INDEX 



265 



Lanfranc, Archbishop, 5 
Langrishe, Sir Hercules, 189 
Laud, Archbishop, 47, 49, 65 
Lecky, W. E. H. (quoted), 148 
Lenthall, Speaker, 38 
Leonard, E. M. (quoted), 64 
Letters on a Regicide Peace, 186, 

203 
Levellers, 48 
Lilburne, John, 63 
Long Parliament, the, 37, 38, 54, 

55 
Loudoun, John, 4th Earl of, 150 
Louis XIV, no, 195 
Louis XV, 101, 195, 205 
Louis XVI, 195 
Lyttleton, George, Baron, 139, 149 

McCulloch, J. R. (quoted), 161 
Magna Carta, 7 
Major-Generals, the, 59 
Manchester, 2nd Earl of, 41, 42 
Marat, Jean Paul, 208 
Marie-Antoinette, Queen, 168, 183- 

187, 195, 196, 203, 207, 208 
Marlborough, Sarah, Duchess of, 

140, 145 
Marvell, Andrew, 50 
Mayerne, Sir Theodore, 45 
Maynooth, Endowment of, 240 
Melbourne, 2nd Viscount, 247 
Milton, John, 59 
Monasteries, the English, 233 
Moore, Sir John, 158 
More, Sir Thomas, 24 
Morley, John Viscount (quoted), 

176, 184 
Murray, John (quoted), 216 

Napoleon I, Emperor of the 
French, 17 

Navigation Acts, 70, 71, 72 

Newcastle, Thomas Pelham Hol- 
ies, Duke of, 145, 165 

"New Model" Army, 47 



Norman Conquest, 5 
North, Frederick, Lord, 171, 176, 
226 

Observations on the Present State 
of the Nation, 202 

O'Connell, Daniel, 218 

Oldfield, Ann, 102 

Onslow, Speaker, 87 

Origin of our Ideas of the Sub- 
lime and Beautiful, 166, 168 

"Patriots," the Boy, 95, 103, 139 
scq., 146, 149 

Palmerston, 3rd Viscount, 25, 259 

Peel, Sir Robert, 24, 105, 212, 216, 
217, 230, 252-256 

Pelhams, The (see Newcastle, 
Duke of) 

Peter the Great of Russia, 197 

Peter of Savoy, 25 

Peters, Hugh, 54 

Philpot, Sir John, 132 

Pitt, Ann, 164 

Pitt, Essex, 131 

Pitt, George, Baron Rivers, 123, 
131 

Pitt, John, 2nd Earl of Chatham, 
118 

Pitt, Lucy, 131 

Pitt, Nicholas, 123 

Pitt, Thomas, Earl of London- 
derry, 130 

Pitt, Thomas, "Diamond," 114, 
122, 124 seq., 143, 152 

Pitt, Mrs., 127 

Pitt, Thomas, 1st Baron Camel- 
ford, 131 

Pitt, Thomas, 2nd Baron Camel- 
ford, 82 

Pitt, William, 1st Earl of Chat- 
ham, 1, 13-15. 24, 79 seq., 93, 
95, 96, 105, 107, 115, 120-152, 
164, 166, 226 



266 



INDEX 



Pitt, William, the Younger, 14, 

24, 151-163, 226 
Pitt, William, of Strathfieldsaye, 

123 
Pole, Cardinal, 24 
Poles, Dukes of Suffolk, 132 
Poor Laws, 58, 64 
Popanilla, the Voyage of, 18, 219, 

243-246, 254 
Pope, Alexander, 87, 129 
Price, Dr. R., 161 
Protectorate, 58 seq. 
Prynne, William, 49, 50 
Pulteney, William, Earl of Bath, 

107 
Pym, John, 36, 37, 48, 49 

Quebec, capture of, 115 

Rainborow, Colonel, 62 

Reflections on the Revolution in 
Franc*, 177, 178 seq. 

Reform Act of 1832, 10, 217, 224, 
257, 260 

Reform Act of 1867, 257 

Reformation, English, 6, 39, 226, 
233, 236 

Revolution, English, of 1688, 11, 
169, 198 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 170 

Rich, Edmund, Archbishop, 24 

Richelieu, Cardinal, 185 

Robespierre, Maximilien, 208 

Rockingham, 2nd Marquis of, 200, 
201 

Roland, Madame, 196 

Roman Republic and Empire, 1, 73 

Russell, Lord John (Earl Rus- 
sell), 217, 260 

Russia, 3, 196, 197 

Sacheverell, trial, 97 
Salisbury, 3rd Marquis of, 37, 257 
Seditious Meetings Act, 155 
Shaftesbury, 1st Earl of, 165 
Shaw, G. Bernard, 253 



Sheridan, Richard, 169 

Shippen, E., leader of Jacobites, 

in 
Sidney, Algernon, 72 
Simon de Montford, 5, 24 
Sinking Fund, 161, 162 
Slave Trade, 160 
Smith, Sidney, 210 
Social Reform Legislation and 

Disraeli, 257 
South Sea Bubble, 85, 91 
Spain, wars with, 11, 69, 93-97, 99, 

145, 146 
Stair, Lord, 104 
Stamp Act, 1765, 148, 201 
Strafford, Earl of (Thomas 

Wentworth), 28, 29, 42, 58, 62, 

64, 68, 74 
Suez Canal Shares, 258 
Sybil, 213, 219, 221 seq., 228 seq., 

249, 255, 257, 258, 260 

Tancred, 219, 221, 238-242, 251 

Teignmouth, Lord, 175 

Test Act, 178 

Townshend, Charles, Lord, 80 

Trades-Unions, Legislation, 258 

Traitorous Correspondence Act, 

155 
Treasonable Practices Act, 155 
Tudors, the dynasty and period, 

6, 31, 210, 217 
"Twelve-hundred-a-yearers," 223 

Vane, Sir Harry, 59 

Vaudois, persecution of, 44 

Verney, Lady, 38 

Victoria, Queen, 18, 211, 212, 258 

Villiers, Harriet, 130 

Vincent, 127 

Walcheren Expedition, 118 
Wales, Frederick, Prince of, 11 1 
Wallmoden, Madam, 86 
Walpole, de, Bishop, 78 
Walpole, Edward, 78, 79 



INDEX 



267 



Walpole, George, 80 
Walpole, Henry, 78 
Walpole, Horace, 79, 88, 101, m- 

118, 123, 151 
Walpole, Horatio, Baron, 79, 80 
Walpole, Sir Robert, 1st Earl of 

Or ford, 10, 12, 13, 76-119, 136, 

226 
Walpole, Lady, 1st wife, 85, 91, 

101 
Walpole, Lady, 2nd wife, 102 
Walpole, daughter of Sir Robert, 

101 
Walsingham, Sir Francis, 33 
Wars of the Roses, 6, 7, 226, 227, 

231 
Warwick the King-maker, 6, 24 
Wexford, siege of, 68 



Whalley, Edward, 40 
VVhittington, Sir Richard, 132 
Wilberforce, Bishop, 160 
William I, the Conqueror, 5, 6, 61, 

204, 210 
William III of England, no, 126. 

198, 204 
William II, German Emperor, 1 
Williams, Morgan, 39 
Williams, Richard (see Cromwell, 

Richard) 
Windebank, Colonel, 51 
Windham, William, 173, 174, 177 
Wolsey, Cardinal, 24, 26, 33 

Young, Arthur, 101 
"Young England," 255, 256 



